Campion speaks out for women in film

Jane Campion has spoken out about the lack of female filmmakers while being honoured for her own achievements at the Cannes Film Festival. The New Zealander was one of 35 high-profile directors – the rest of them male – invited to make a short film for Cannes’ 60th anniversary this year. She described her fantasy sequence, in which a woman dressed as a ladybug is trampled in a movie theatre, as a metaphor for women in the film world. “I just think this is the way the world is, that men control the money, and they decide who they’re going to give it to,” she said. Campion is the only woman filmmaker to have won Cannes’ top prize and is one of just three women ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for best director. Both her Cannes win and Academy Award nomination were for 1993’s The Piano.