women in the spotlight at the 77th Cannes Film Festival

There were only four directors, out of the 22 feature films in official competition, to have had their films selected in the 77^e Cannes film festival. Two of them appear this May 25 on the list awarded by the 2024 jury and its president, Greta Gerwig. The Frenchwoman Coralie Fargeat, firstly, rewarded with the screenplay prize for The Substancea movie of “body horror» with Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, a scathing satire of the injunction to young people whose bodies, charred and transformed, have provoked their dose of thrills on the Croisette. Receiving her award, the 47-year-old director highlighted how her film dealt with “the experience of women in the world”.

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A few minutes later, it was Payal Kapadia who went on stage with her three actresses, Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha and Chhaya Kadam to receive the grand prize awarded to All We Imagine as Light, first Indian film presented in competition in thirty years. A story of sisterhood and friendship, a value highlighted by the director in her speech, between three women escaping from the conservative straitjacket of Indian society.

Diversity

Among the women in the spotlight, a quartet, too: that of the actresses of Emilia Perez, awarded a collective performance prize by the jury, for highlighting the diversity of their characters. Jacques Audiard’s film, an improbable and twisting “opera” telling the story of a Mexican drug trafficker wishing to change gender, stars Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana, Adriana Paz and trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón in the title role . The latter, alone on stage to receive the prize, called for tolerance towards trans people in a speech punctuated with tears: “All of you who have made us suffer so much, it is also time to change”.

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Dialogue

It remains that the list of 77^e Cannes Festival will have honored many directors. Including three which put heroines in the spotlight. In addition to Jacques Audiard, also awarded the jury prize, the Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof, who went into clandestine exile from his country to present The Seed of the sacred fig, received a special jury prize for this film which shows a family torn apart from the inside while the “Woman, Life, Liberty” movement and its violent repression rumbles. As for the American Sean Baker, winner of the 2024 Palme d’Or for Anorabroken love story between an escort girl and the son of a Russian oligarch, he concluded his acceptance speech by bowing on stage “sex workers, past, present and future. Stories of women told by men: enough, perhaps, to reflect the jury’s desire to embark on the path to equality by choosing dialogue between the genders, in every sense of the term. An ideal which cinema, via fiction, would echo.