Acclaimed director Carla Simón spoke about the importance of gender equity in filmmaking during her Kering Women in Motion Talk at Cannes on Friday, saying: “We are half of the world, we should tell half of the stories.”
The Spanish filmmaker, who premiered her new film “Romería” in competition at Cannes Film Festival this week, said female representation behind as well as in front of the camera is “so important.”
“I feel that we are advancing, little by little, not so fast. But at least things are changing,” she said. “And I think we live in a moment [where] there’s a historical reparation of themes that have always been told by men, and suddenly we take our perspective. And this is so important because we are half of the world, we should tell half of the stories in order to have a diverse look at the world.”
Simón continued that this is “so, so needed” because stories “mark society” and are ultimately what help the world to evolve.
“I think little by little, we are getting there,” she said. “It’s fragile… I think we cannot stop talking about it and making sure that we don’t go back.”
“Romería” is a personal film for Simón, as it follows an orphaned young woman who travels to the Spanish city of Vigo looking for more information about her biological father, who died of AIDS. There, she meets his side of the family, who are reluctant to revisit the past out of shame. The storyline closely mirrors Simón’s own life, as both of her parents died from AIDS when she was 6 years old.
“It was born out of my frustration of not knowing much about my parents when I was a kid,” she said during the Kering talk. “My family never told me clear things and I had to kind of almost invent a story for them. And the film is about that, about the power of cinema to create the images that you don’t have.”
