PARIS – Kering will celebrate 10 years of Women in Motion at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival in May.
To mark the decade, the fashion conglomerate invited festival president Iris Knobloch and group chief brand officer Laurent Claquin to host a roundtable with USC Annenberg’s Stacy L. Smith at its headquarters Thursday.
Smith and Katherine Pieper presented a study taking stock of how women have made gains both in front of and behind the camera since the first edition in 2015.
Smith praised Women in Motion’s focus on putting women in the spotlight with its annual awards in Cannes. Trailblazers such as actresses Jane Fonda, Viola Davis and Michelle Yeoh have been among the recipients, alongside executives including Universal Studios’ Donna Langley.
“Awards are one way to really galvanize press recognition and to let women in the industry know that they’re being heard, they’re being seen and that their efforts are really important, and this has traction, and this has a cachet to it that really can advance an executive, an actor or a filmmaker’s career,” Smith said.
Francois-Henri Pinault and Viola Davis at the Kering Women in Motion awards.
Stephane Feugere / WWD
Smith also highlighted how the emerging talent award boosts young female filmmakers’ profiles.
“[The award] provides not only financial assistance, but also press attention, which is really important to creating buzz and a cacophony of voices around these directors to get them meetings, to get them past any initial hurdles.”
The winners of the emerging talent award have gone on to direct TV series and feature films and been nominated for and won numerous prestigious prizes.
“Amplifying that recognition is really important for agents, managers, financiers, sales agents in moving forward these talented directors and ensuring that they have the same careers as their male counterparts,” she added.
Looking at the data from movies in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the U.S. and the U.K. that had box office revenue of at least $1 million, Smith showed that 32 percent of films had women leads or co-leads in 2015 when Women in Motion was launched, climbing to 54 percent of films in 2024.
However, the data showed that what hasn’t moved too much is the proportion of secondary female characters having speaking roles or female characters that are older than 40. Those remain at 32 percent and 25 percent, respectively.
Behind the camera, the number of female directors in the U.S. has nearly doubled from 8.5 percent to 16.2 percent; grown from 14.4 percent to 25.9 percent in France, and jumped in the U.K. from 8.3 percent to 32.3 percent mostly due to government funding initiatives and film board rules.
The number of female-directed films at film festivals has shown improvement from 18.2 percent a decade ago, to 26.8 percent in 2024.
Smith remarked that continued major areas of concern from Women in Motion talk participants include how women directors are pigeonholed as difficult to work with, the difficulty for women to find financing for their films, or that female directors are kept in indie films and not given the same opportunities for big budget productions.
“Conversations like Women in Motion are really important to bringing pay disparities to light and providing a way for women on screen and behind the camera to discuss more openly the ways in which they’re compensated for their time and talent,” Smith said.
She added that these topics would be new areas of discussion to focus on in upcoming editions of the talks.
The annual awards and talks will continue with the support of Kering. The company has just signed on to support the initiative for another five years, and “it will be an ongoing partnership,” Claquin told WWD.
Brazilian director Marianna Brennand was named the recipient of this year’s Women in Motion Emerging Talent Award, which will be handed out at the gala dinner May 18.
Claquin added that this year’s program will be expanded to include more events that are open to the public to increase the visibility of the initiative and raise awareness of the issues. There will be events organized at the open-air beach stage, which will be announced in the coming weeks, he added.
He reminisced about the creation of the program under the leadership of Kering chairman and chief executive officer François-Henri Pinault.
Pinault wanted the group to participate in the festival, but “bring an added dimension and something important” to the conversation and have an impact.
“We’re very proud to…continue to make the place of women in cinema a priority not only on the red carpets, but also behind the camera, in the writing of scripts, in theaters, in discussions and at all levels,” he said.
François-Henri Pinault, Amanda Nell Eu, Donna Langley, Iris Knobloch and Thierry Fremaux.
Stéphane Feugère/WWD
Knobloch, who is the first female president of the film festival, said this has been a decade that has “redefined the place of women in our industry.”
“What I love is that Kering took this initiative before the movement, before the hashtag, that it was not done out of reaction, but out of conviction,” she said, noting that it pre-dated the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements.
“It makes me even more happy that in times like today, you stand firm, you are constant in this conviction,” she added.
Discussing the current rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the U.S as directed by the government, Smith said that there has been “a chilling effect” on educational institutions that are likely to have a long-tail repercussions.
“We could see a change in participation, and that is the direct pipeline to the industry for these companies,” she said. Smith highlighted that companies such as Amazon, which had a woman at the helm of its film and TV division until last week, “completely erased” their inclusion policy.
Her data shows that female-centered films make an equitable amount of money as male-centered films when taking into account production and marketing budgets. Ultimately it will come down to the audience, which is shifting with Gen Z.
“The audience dictates these companies’ choices, and so to further court the audience, they will need to continue to lean into what the audience wants and from box office revenue, it is really clear women and people of color are on the top of the agenda and what sells.”
