The “Women in Motion” talks, presented by The Hollywood Reporter and luxury group Kering, resumed Sunday with a conversation with French film writer-director Claire Denis, Chinese director Liu Shu and Chinese producer Ying Liang that addressed the challenges faced by female filmmakers in international cinema. Denis, one of the leading helmers in France since the late 1980s, when she burst onto the scene with Chocolat about a young French woman who returns to West Africa to contemplate her childhood days in a colonial outpost in Cameroon said,
“I was not afraid that it was a man’s world. You don’t grow up naive in Africa.” After being a first assistant director on Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (“My voice was not loud enough when I said, ‘Roll camera’!”), Denis made the jump to directing. She said she struggled with her own insecurities far more than any gender bias.
“The doubt is, ‘Am I creating a good film?’” she said. “I’m tiny. I’m small. Maybe people were saying, ‘Who is this [woman]?’ But this was not touching me at all.”
