Learning Mandarin - Campion laments lack of female directors

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Campion laments lack of female directors

(AP)
Updated: 2007-05-21 08:35





From left, Canadian director Atom Egoyan, New Zealand director Jane
Campion and American director Michael Cimino arrive for the screening of
the film 'Chacun Son Cinema' ('To Each His Own Cinema'), at the 60th
International film festival in Cannes, southern France, on Sunday, May
20, 2007. [AP]

CANNES, France - When Jane Campion was honored onstage at the Cannes Film
Festival with about 30 other major directors Sunday, she was the lone
woman of the bunch. And she's still not used to how strange that feels.


The New Zealander is the only woman filmmaker to have won Cannes' top
prize, for "The Piano" in 1993. This year, she showed a fantasy short
film about a ladybug �� a woman dressed up in an insect costume �� who
gets stomped on in a movie theater. She said it was a metaphor for women
in the film world.

"I just think this is the way the world is, that men control the money,
and they decide who they're going to give it to," Campion said in
explaining why so few women get movies made.

Cannes, like the film world in general, is short on female directors. Of
the 22 movies in the running for the top prize this year at Cannes, only
three were made by women.

Cartoonist Marjane Satrapi co-directed the screen adaptation of her
graphic novel "Persepolis," a memoir of growing up in Iran after the 1979
Islamic revolution; Japan's Naomi Kawase made a road trip film called
"Mogari No Mori" ("The Mourning Forest"); and France's Catherine Breillat
directed "Une Vieille Maitresse" ("An Old Mistress"), a period piece
about the ups and downs of arranging a marriage between a libertine and a
virtuous young aristocrat.

Women have made some high-profile appearances here lately. Last year,
Sofia Coppola took "Marie Antoinette" to Cannes, and in 2005, American
director Miranda July won an award for best first-time filmmaker for "Me
and You and Everyone We Know."

But parity is a long way off at Cannes and across the Atlantic in
Hollywood.

A survey released last year said U.S. female directors made only 7
percent of the 250 highest-grossing films in 2005. Martha M. Lauzen, the
San Diego State University professor who conducted the study, called her
report "The Celluloid Ceiling."

Campion, 53, is one of only three women ever to be nominated for an
Academy Award for best director, along with Coppola ("Lost in
Translation") in 2003 and Lina Wertmuller ("Seven Beauties") in 1976.
Campion was nominated for "The Piano," her account of adultery set in New
Zealand in the 1850s.

Campion was one of 35 directors invited to make a film short for Cannes'
60th anniversary this year. When the group went onstage together Sunday,
Campion was the lone women in a sea of male directors that included Roman
Polanski ("The Pianist"), Gus Van Sant ("Elephant"), Wong Kar-wai ("In
The Mood for Love"), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu ("Babel") and Atom
Egoyan ("The Sweet Hereafter").

Egoyan told Campion afterward that he admired the female vantage point in
her movies' sex scenes �� especially the steamy scenes from the Meg Ryan
thriller "In the Cut," which he called "some of the most erotic material
I've ever seen."

But Campion said some men are "shocked" by that female perspective. "They
see that women have a different way of seeing the world altogether," she
said.

Campion's next picture is the story of poet John Keats' romance with his
young neighbor Fanny Brawne, a love story that was cut short when he died
at age 25. Campion plans to tell the story from Brawne's point of view.

"When I think of what's fantastic about women, it's their generosity,
their intuitiveness, their capacity to trust emotions, to be emotional,
to nurture, to promote peace, to care about the planet's environment so
their children can inherit it," she said. "Those qualities aren't sexy
for guys, but (they're) quite natural in women."












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