THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER
Wide Angle: The female gaze of the Official Selection, or how women film women
Kelly Reichardt, Lynne Ramsay, Kristen Stewart, Carla Simón, Julia Ducournau, Hafsia Herzi, Mascha Schilinski, Scarlett Johansson… A host of female names that feature in the 2025 Official Selection. These names, along with others, have been a breath of fresh air in contemporary cinema in recent years. A “new wave” that continues to rise, amidst a backdrop of general awareness of women’s place in cinema and in the world.
This year, the Official Selection at the Festival de Cannes includes twenty-two films made by women, accounting for 21% of the hundred and four feature films presented, all sections combined. One fact is obvious if we carefully observe this list: out of these twenty-two films, only one features a male main character – The Mastermind by Kelly Reichardt. Known for her poetic and delicate gaze on masculinity, Reichardt notably deconstructed the traditional buddy movie with works such as Old Joy or First Cow.
How can we explain that the vast majority of women particularly want to film other women? In light of this shared view, we can examine what makes the female gaze unique. As defined by Iris Brey in her book Le Regard féminin, une révolution à l’écran, it is a gaze (whether female or male) that “adopts the point of view of a female character embracing her experience”.
Throughout this 78th edition, it is clear that women’s writing is indeed a language of its own. This language seeks to set itself free from gender stigmatizations that have impacted – and still impact – numerous productions.
What women film
Long ignored (or forgotten) by the film industry, topics inherent to the female experience are now returning to the heart of the action. For example, the topic of motherhood, both as a personal experience – in Die, My Love by Lynne Ramsay, Karavan (Caravan) by Zuzana Kirchnerová or Love Me Tender by Anna Cazenave Cambet – or as a filmmaker’s reflection of her own mother, in My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay, Dites-lui que je l’aime (Tell Her I Love Her) by Romane Bohringer, or Romería (Romeria) by Carla Simón. In the latter film, the director even reimagines her own missing mother through her young performer, Llúcia Garcia, in a magnificent dream sequence where mother and daughter are one.
Through stories of female friendships, sisterhood connections are also increasingly explored today. We must not forget that these were once rare on screen, due to the absence of a male character – as Maria Schneider, Jane Fonda and Juliet Berto pointed out in 1975, in the documentary Sois belle et tais-toi by Delphine Seyrig. In Die, My Love, Lynne Ramsay documents with heightened sensitivity the visceral connection between Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and her stepmother (Sissy Spacek). Similarly, Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson’s first film, portrays an intergenerational female friendship as a necessity to represent woman-to-woman sharing.
“I’d rather film a beautiful kiss a hundred times than a simulated love scene”
– Hafsia Herzi
The female gaze ultimately and above all expresses itself in the way of filming female bodies, sexualities and desires, crucial subjects of this new type of representation. In contrast to the male gaze, the female gaze does not seek to aestheticize or sexualize female characters. From this point of view, Hafsia Herzi’s La Petite Dernière is one of the Selection’s most delicate examples, with the director’s desire to “film a beautiful kiss rather than a simulated love scene”.
When women take their own stories into their own hands and tell them in the first person, the art of filmmaking can also help to heal wounds and transcend trauma – like Kristen Stewart’s film, The Chronology of Water.
