Things took a heated turn on Monday at a press conference by the General Delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Fremaux, on the eve of the opening of the festival on May 14. “We are not giving the Noble Peace Prize,” said Mr Fremaux when questioned about the criticism heaped against Cannes for giving honorary Palme d’Or to legendary French actor Alain Delon, despite his archaic views on homosexuality and his admission of having slapped women. While talking about the “contradictions in history”, Mr Fremaux said that festival was honouring him for his years as an actor. He stressed on the significance of “context”, saying that the actor came from a different generation but was being judged with the eyes of the new and young.

He felt that Cannes was criticised more than other organisations when it came to societal, political issues and there was this expectation by the media that the festival should be “impeccable and perfect”. He wondered about the representation of women in media itself.

Mr Fremaux asserted that the selection of films at the festival will not be on the basis of gender. “The films that are there deserved to be selected; they are not there simply because they have been made by women,” said Mr Fremaux. “We are looking at the end of chain,” he said, while, according to him, it is the beginning — the fostering at film schools, training and exposure that need to widened; that can bring about a change that is incremental than immediate.

Cannes has traditionally been criticised for its gender skew. Till last year there had been 1600 odd competition titles from men in the entire history of the festival as against just 82 from women. It had made 82 women film professionals take to a silent protest on the red carpet on May 12 last year, perhaps the most memorable image of Cannes 2018. Jane Campion remains the only female director to have won the Palme d’Or, for her 1993 film The Piano.

This year has seen a marginal improvement with four women directors competing for the Palme D’Or--Atlantique by Mati Diop, Little Joe by Jessica Hausner, Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma and Sibyl by Justine Triet — and 13 in the overall selection. The last that the figure of four was achieved was in 2011. Last year three women made it to the competition section as they did in 2016 and 2017. In 2015 and 2014 there were two women, in 2013 one and in 2012 none.

Un Certain Regard has six films directed by seven female directors of the 16 titles on view — Zabou Breitman and Eléa Gobé Mévellec’s The Swallows of Kabul, Monia Chokri’s A Brother’s Life, Danielle Lessovitz’s Port Authority, Mounia Meddour’s Papicha, Maryam Touzani’s Adam and Annie Silverstein’s Bull.

Last year 50:50 by 2020 pledge had been undertaken by the festival. Under the charter, Cannes took upon itself to record the gender of the cast and crew of all films submitted, to make public the names of selection committee members and work towards gender parity on the Cannes board the festival management and the programming teams. The film’s selection committee this year was gender balanced with an equal number of women and men on board.

If the main competition opens with Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, it’s Chokri’s A Brother’s Life that kicks off Un Certain Regard. The juries for the Un Certain Regard and Cinefondation sections are headed by women — Nadine Labaki and Claire Denis respectively. The main competition jury has Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu as the President but has equal number of male and female jury members.