Cate Blanchett Just Led a Powerful Silent Protest for Gender Equity on the Cannes Red Carpet

“Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of our industry says otherwise.”

Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

At the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, actress Cate Blanchett and 81 other women in film marched in silence on the red carpet to call out the lack of female directors selected for the world’s top festival.

The women stopped halfway up the steps to the Palais des Festivals, and Blanchett, in a statement read alongside documentary filmmaker Agnes Varda, demanded equal pay and safer working conditions for women. Blanchett, serving as Cannes’ jury president, called for a world “that allows all of us in front and behind the camera, all of us, to thrive shoulder to shoulder with our male colleagues.”

Blanchett, who was joined by Ava DuVernay, Salma Hayek, and Kristen Stewart, said that the 82 women protesting represented the 82 female directors whose films had been selected for the festival since it began in 1942—a stark contrast to the 1,688 male directors that she said had climbed those steps before. This year, just three of the festival’s 21 films were directed by women. Just one woman, Jane Campion, has won the festival’s top prize, for the 1993 film The Piano. The red carpet protest was organized by the collective 5050×2020, which works to address gender inequality in the film industry. 

“Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of our industry says otherwise,” Blanchett said. “As women, we all face our own unique challenges, but we stand together on these steps today as a symbol of our determination and our commitment to progress. We are writers, we are producers, we are directors, actresses, cinematographers, talent agents, editors, distributors, sales agents, and all of us are involved in the cinematic arts. And we stand today in solidarity with women of all industries.”

You can watch her speech below. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate