Women held 17% of key behind-camera roles when the Celluloid Ceiling study began tracking the figure in 1998. Last year, that number stood at 23%. That statistic opened a panel at the Lumière Summit on Monday titled “Safer Sets, Different Stories: Why Gender Balance Matters,” where leaders from StudioCanal, Canal+, the BFI, the Berlinale and the Toronto Film Festival called for structural accountability measures and argued that the failure to include women is as much a creative loss as a moral one.
A woman director’s budget runs, on average, at 44% of that assigned to a male director. Canal+ has extended its development budget by €1 million over three years specifically to finance projects from female writers and directors, Marsh said, and a film about silent cinema pioneer Alice Guy, to be directed by Anne Le Ny, is in development. Ben Roberts, director general of the British Film Institute, drew on the BFI’s own Sight and Sound “Greatest Films of All Time” poll to make the case.
In 2012, just three of the top 100 films were directed by women; by 2022, that had risen to 11, with two each by Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman. So, the inequality is tragic.” He pointed to the BFI’s Inclusion Standards, dating from around 2014, and the new Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority as structural measures. Berlinale festival director Tricia Tuttle cited her own festival’s data.
In 2005, women directed 0% of films in Berlinale competition. By 2015 that had reached 15%, and by 2025 it stood at 40%. She added that data consistently shows films made with greater gender balance perform better commercially.
Cameron Bailey, chief executive of the Toronto Film Festival, said the festival’s programming team has maintained around 50% women for more than a decade and that TIFF’s 2026 selection stands at 35% films directed by women, up from 25% a decade ago. He traced the Share Her Journey initiative – launched at TIFF in 2017 by his sister Maxine Bailey – to a conviction that gatekeepers must actively surface work by women. Angèle Diabang, a filmmaker from Senegal, described founding the Mousso Institute in 2022.
I want her there because she knows her craft.” Working in cohorts of six in Casamance – her home region, deliberately chosen over the capital Dakar to decentralize opportunity – the institute trains women as cinematographers, sound engineers, lighting technicians and editors, entirely free of charge. Two cohorts, 12 women trained. France’s CNC has required all cast, crew and technicians on French productions to undergo gender-based violence training since 2021.
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