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France Offers Its Film Industry Incentives to Hire Women

Françoise Nyssen, the French culture minister, with Emmanuel Macron, president of France, left, and Danish Crown Prince Frederik. Ms. Nyssen announced incentives on Thursday to induce the French film industry to hire women.Credit...Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

France is introducing financial incentives to persuade its film industry to recruit more female talent.

Film productions with anywhere from four to eight women in key positions would be eligible for a higher government subsidy, Françoise Nyssen, the French culture minister, announced on Thursday. She said fewer than one in six movies currently qualified. Projects would be rated according to a point system — one point per female director, one point per female screenwriter, and so on — and any movie with eight points would be eligible for the maximum increase, 15 percent.

“I believe in financial incentives,” Ms. Nyssen said, announcing the package of gender-related measures at a conference on parity and diversity at the French National Film Board headquarters. “When things don’t change by themselves, or do so too slowly, it’s up to us to bring about change.”

Ms. Nyssen was following up on a pledge she made at the Cannes Film Festival in May to make film subsidies more dependent on the achievement of certain gender-parity goals.

This year’s festival — held against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement and allegations of sexual misconduct against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein — was dominated by issues of gender inequality. In a spectacular rally, a group of 82 women in film (one for every female-directed movie ever to have been in the main Cannes competition, which is less than 5 percent of the total) swarmed the red carpet.

The march was organized by a collective called 5050 by 2020, which is pushing for gender equality in the film industry by the end of the decade. According to the collective’s figures, out of a total of 2,066 directors in France who had made one or more films between 2006 and 2016, only 23 percent were women. Broken down by genre, the figure rose to 29 percent in documentaries, but was only 4 percent in animated films.

Sandrine Brauer, a member of the group, reacted positively to the French announcement.

“We’re collectively happy, because these are very concrete measures that are going to be introduced right away,” said Ms. Brauer, a film producer. She said the minister’s requirement that submissions for film subsidies include gendered breakdowns of crew members was another important step.

“An ideal world would be a world of equal opportunity,” Ms. Brauer said. “What we’re seeing right now is that if a female crew member works, say, 100 hours in a given year, her male counterpart works a lot more. And if a female director makes three movies in 10 years, her male equivalent makes four.

“That means that there are obstacles, and those obstacles are what we’re looking to analyze and knock down.”

Yet François Ivernel — a former top executive of the French entertainment giant Pathé, who has just produced “The White Crow,” directed by Ralph Fiennes — said that while he supported equal pay and gender equality, he found the new measures “artificial.”

“I don’t know many male producers or directors who want to surround themselves with men,” he said. “They’re looking for the most competent people in the field.”

Mr. Ivernel said that while he was aware of a shortage of female cinematographers, pretty much every other film discipline had women. “I don’t think quotas or financial measures parachuted from on high are going to solve the problem,” he said.

Mr. Ivernel said he had noticed an increasing number of young women studying at La Fémis, France’s top film school. “The transition from one generation to another will solve the problem — mentalities are changing,” he said.

Canada has already introduced a point system under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has made gender equality a priority. The Canadian government’s film financing board, Telefilm Canada, announced in November 2016 that it would favor movies directed or written by women.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Incentives to Hire More Women in Film. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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