Cannes 2026 | 8 Women Filmmakers Who Broke The Glass Ceiling At The Film Festival

The Cannes Film Festival will mark its 80th anniversary next year. Nonetheless, its legacy is as glorious, as it is mired in acute disparities. There have only been three instances when the Palme d'Or was swept by a woman. In 2018, Cate Blanchett, the jury president, led a gender-equality protest on the red carpet. 82 women—constituting actors, writers, directors, producers, distributors—participated in the demonstration. 82 represents the number of women directors who have had movies in Competition in Cannes during its 71 years. That contrasts sharply with 1688 men.

Cannes didn’t even program four competition titles from women until 2011. Julia Ducournau triumphed in 2021, decades after when New Zealander Jane Campion won for The Piano in 1992. Yet, it must be mentioned that even Campion had to share the prize with a fellow male director. Cannes’ 2021 edition was also historic in the sense that the Palme d’Or, Caméra d’Or, Un Certain Regard Prize and Palme d’Or for best short film, all went to women directors. 2023 saw Justine Triet land the big award for Anatomy of a Fall. Triet would go on to replicate the trajectory of The Piano by landing Oscar nods for Best Picture and Best Director. 2023 and 2025 were the only two years when seven female filmmakers have elbowed their way into the main competition. In 2019, Mati Diop became the first black woman with a film in Competition. Her film, Atlantics, eventually scored the Grand Prix.

Similarly, the best director award also reflects dismal statistics. It has gone to women only twice—in 1961 to Yulia Solntseva for Chronicle of Flaming Years and then, 71 years later, to Sofia Coppola for The Beguiled in 2017. This year’s edition will see Barbra Streisand being the fourth honorary Palme d’Or recipient, after Meryl Streep, Jodi Foster and Agnès Varda.

Here are few of the female filmmakers who surged into Cannes and have been formidable forces:

The Italian director is a mainstay at Cannes. Her debut, Heavenly Body, premiered at Directors' Fortnight sidebar in 2011. Her second feature, The Wonders, won the Grand Prix at the 2014 festival. This personal tale evokes the daily lives of young sisters on an isolated farm and modern society catching up with them with the filming of a reality show. The next outing, Happy as Lazzaro, won Best Screenplay in 2018, cementing her status as one of the most singular voices working today. Its hallucinatory blend of social critique, magic realism and enchanting allegory brings utter freshness. Her last film, La Chimera, starring Josh O'Connor, was also in Competition in 2023. She served on the 2019 competition jury, which awarded the Palme d'Or to Bong Joon Ho's Parasite. Last year, she chaired the jury of the Caméra d’or.

The Scottish filmmaker has been a regular at Cannes since her first graduate film, Small Deaths, which won the Jury Prize for the Best Short Film in 1996. Another short, Gasman, repeated the feat in 1998. She ascended the ranks with successive films, such as Ratcatcher, her debut feature film presented at Un Certain Regard in 2000; the seething, dark psychodrama We Need to Talk about Kevin, the only British film up for the Palme d’Or in 2011; and You Were Never Really Here featuring Joaquin Phoenix, which won the Award for Best Screenplay in 2017. Ramsay returned to Competition with Die My Love in 2025. She served on the jury of the 2013 edition.

The German filmmaker burst onto the 2016 edition with her lacerating, layered, tonally unpredictable triumph, Toni Erdmann. The Bucharest-set dramedy stars Peter Simonischek as a father who surprises his workaholic consultant daughter, Ines (Sandra Hüller), on the job in a failed attempt to inject laughter into her cold, relentless corporate world. Toni Erdmann was that edition’s breakout discovery, emerging an instant, universal favourite. Its egregious snub by the Cannes jury remains one of the most glaring lapses in the festival’s history. Nevertheless, the film topped the Sight and Sound annual poll, won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize, several European Film Awards and German Film Awards. It was nominated for Golden Globe, César, BAFTA and Oscar awards for Best Foreign Language Film and was sold in over 100 countries worldwide. Ade is reportedly working on her next feature—her first film in over a decade.

Having won an Oscar before she even graduated to features (for short film Wasp, in 2005), British doyenne of social realism, Andrea Arnold has won the jury prize at Cannes three times, more than anyone in history except for Ken Loach—a director with over 30 features. The hat-trick came for Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016). Nobody else quite catches the mood of occupying the fringes as she does. In 2021, she presided over the Un Certain Regard jury. She was back in Competition with Bird (2024).

The French filmmaker’s freely bonkers, wildly audacious Titane (2021) may have its fair share of detractors, but its explosive imagination pulverises debate. A delirious film that begins with a serial killer who has sex with a car gradually shifts gears into tender terrain of unusual bonds. Spike Lee-led Cannes jury made an outrageously inspired choice by bestowing it with the Palme d’Or. Julia Ducournau is the second woman director to win the festival’s top prize, following Jane Campion. In 2023, she was appointed to the Competition jury.

French director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) led the career renaissance of Demi Moore. MUBI swooped in for distribution rights before Cannes kicked off. A body-horror film in Competition is a rarity. But it became one of the edition’s biggest talking-points. It is provocative, polarising and undeniable, sweeping the Best Screenplay prize at the festival. The gory gonzo horror reckons with brutal beauty conventions, the violence on women’s bodies and their damaging perception of themselves. The Substance went on to snag five Oscar nominations, winning for makeup and hairstyling.

In 2024, Payal Kapadia made history twice for her fiction feature debut, All We Imagine As Light, as it became the first Indian film in Competition in three decades, while also clinching the Grand Prix. The tale of three women trying to make a living in Mumbai had the ultimate fairytale trajectory a film can have. It found distribution in over 85 countries, even securing a pan-India theatrical release. As Variety noted, it became one of the most theatrically distributed Indian indies of all time. Topping the Sight and Sound annual poll, the film won Best International Feature at a raft of awards, including Gotham and New York Film Critics Circle. Kapadia picked a Best Director nomination at the Golden Globes. Previously, she’d won the Best Documentary prize at Cannes 2021 for A Night of Knowing Nothing. She returned in 2025 to serve on the Competition jury, hopping later onto the Locarno jury. This year, she will preside over the Critics' Week sidebar.

The French filmmaker's début film Water Lilies played in the Un Certain Regard section in 2007. Girlhood was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar in 2014, instantly hailed as one of the greatest coming-of-age films in years. In 2019, Portrait of a Lady on Fire—a shimmering refraction of a love story through art and vice versa—shook up Cannes, picking up a screenplay prize. The film also won the Queer Palm at Cannes, becoming the first film directed by a woman to win the award. It sparked a ferocious auction at the festival, with Neon and Hulu beating offers from Sony Pictures Classics and Netflix.