France

[FR] First steps towards parity in the film industry

IRIS 2018-9:1/16

Amélie Blocman

Légipresse

As announced at the latest Cannes Film Festival, the first conference on parity, equality and diversity in the film industry was held in Paris on 20 September. Following consultation with the industry, the Minister for Culture, Françoise Nyssen, presented an initial series of practical measures designed to promote gender equality.

Firstly, a 15% bonus applicable to financial subsidies for films in which the main roles are equally distributed between men and women will be trialled. An eight-point scale will be used to measure female representation in key positions. “Today, fewer than one out of six films would be eligible”, said the minister, who added that she “believed in financial incentives”. Under the second part of the plan, it will be compulsory to include statistics relating to gender, technical teams and wage bills in applications submitted to the National Centre for Cinema (Centre national du cinéma - CNC). Information will need to include the number of men and women involved, how they are distributed across the various roles, differences in salary, etc. A charter of good practices for equality will also be adopted by the start of 2019 for all film companies in France, with stringent requirements concerning access to senior positions, salaries, the fight against harassment, etc. The minister also announced that partnerships with local authorities would be reinforced with the aim of including strong measures to promote equality in their agreements with the CNC: male/female parity will be required as regards the composition of aid-granting committees; statistics concerning supported films should include gender-related data; and there must be greater support for female directors and improved access for women to film creation and production subsidies. The minister also wants to ensure that more films featured in visual image education programmes are produced by women: “Today, only 7% of applications to the CNC for film restoration and digitisation subsidies concern films produced by women,” said Françoise Nyssen.

These initial measures “won’t be the last,” said the minister, who announced that other plans were already in place to extend the measures to cover film distribution and exploitation, as well as audiovisual production (“… television channels also share some of the responsibility …”), and to take the concept of diversity in all its facets into account, rather than gender equality alone.