Biography

[on the Cannes Film Festival] Cannes itself is a two-week celebration of male brains and female beauty, as a walk down the Croisette in the evening will attest. Many wheelers, dealers and producers still parade with paid-for models or prostitutes on their arms, which makes female film-makers deeply uneasy about what, precisely, is valued by the money men. [2018]

[on the Cannes Film Festival] The core values of Cannes' ancien regime remain, so far, unchanged. The celebration of the male auteur above all; the marginalising of women's work. [2018]

[on Lars von Trier's notorious press conference at Cannes 2011] I remember the tirade well, because I asked the question that sparked it, about Von Trier's German roots and his declared admiration for the "Nazi aesthetic" in a Danish Film Institute magazine. It's not the sort of question the press asks at Cannes; the male auteur is expected to be treated with reverence, and actors remain on their celebrity pedestals. [2018]