France is introducing financial incentives to persuade its film industry to recruit more female talent, reports The New York Times.
Film productions with anywhere from four to eight women in key positions would be eligible for a higher government subsidy, Françoise Nyssen, the French culture minister, announced on Thursday. She said fewer than one in six movies currently qualified. Projects would be rated according to a point system — one point per female director, one point per female screenwriter, and so on — and any movie with eight points would be eligible for the maximum increase, 15 percent.
“I believe in financial incentives,” Ms. Nyssen said, announcing the package of gender-related measures at a conference on parity and diversity at the French National Film Board headquarters. “When things don’t change by themselves, or do so too slowly, it’s up to us to bring about change.”
Ms. Nyssen was following up on a pledge she made at the Cannes Film Festival in May to make film subsidies more dependent on the achievement of certain gender-parity goals.
This year’s festival — held against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement and allegations of sexual misconduct against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein — was dominated by issues of gender inequality. In a spectacular rally, a group of 82 women in film (one for every female-directed movie ever to have been in the main Cannes competition, which is less than 5 percent of the total) swarmed the red carpet.
The march was organized by a collective called 5050 by 2020, which is pushing for gender equality in the film industry by the end of the decade. According to the collective’s figures, out of a total of 2,066 directors in France who had made one or more films between 2006 and 2016, only 23 percent were women. Broken down by genre, the figure rose to 29 percent in documentaries, but was only 4 percent in animated films.
Sandrine Brauer, a member of the group, reacted positively to the French announcement.
“We’re collectively happy, because these are very concrete measures that are going to be introduced right away,” said Ms. Brauer, a film producer.