It’s not just about the red carpet: Longtime Cannes Film Festival sponsor L’Oréal Paris is putting the spotlight on female filmmakers with its Lights on Women award.
Launched in 2021, the prize saw two years of virtual speeches and scaled-down events, but for the third edition, L’Oréal is gearing up for a splashier event at the Hotel Martinez on May 26.
Kate Winslet serves as president and jury of one, watching every entry and deciding on the final honoree. She joined the brand as global ambassador in June 2021, and jumped directly into screening the films and selecting the first prize, presented that July.
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When she signed on, Winslet was interested in what else the brand could do outside of the beauty box.
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“From the beginning she said, ‘I want to be the jury, I want to see everything, I will make the time,’” L’Oréal Paris global brand president Delphine Viguier-Hovasse told WWD. “She knows [our products] and on top of that, we have a mission to increase women’s visibility and put women at the forefront of the stage.”
Viguier-Hovasse stepped into the top spot herself in 2019, and wanted the brand to increase its profile in Cannes.
“Launching the prize three years ago, we decided to be more involved and active in the way we push women forward in cinema, because it’s really mixing the history of the brand with cinema with the mission of the brand, which is empowering women,” she said.
In order to support the festival, L’Oréal decided to select from the Short Films Competition slate and La Cinef student film program of the official selection.
While L’Oréal remains true to its core as a beauty brand and provides hair and makeup for jurors and celebrities for the fortnight in Cannes, Viguier-Hovasse wanted to expand the messaging around the festival.
“We want to move [forward] from doing only glamour,” she said. “That’s why we decided to create this prize for women directors. It’s really giving visibility to women in cinema, because up to now only 17 percent of directors are women. So the idea is really to push the presence of women into the directors’ family,” she said, quoting industry-wide statistics from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.
This year, Cannes has a record seven female directors in competition for the top Palme d’Or prize — marking a record 31 percent female representation. Out-of-competition and sidebar screenings bump that number up a little, but it still falls short of the “50-50 by 2020” goal set out at the festival in 2018.
While the Lights on Women prize was conceived the following year, Viguier-Hovasse said it is part of a broader brand mission rather than a specific reaction. She cites L’Oréal as having a long history of bringing women of all age ranges and from around the globe into the spokesperson family, as well as its various campaigns for self-esteem and against street harassment.
“Diversity and inclusion has been in the brand from the beginning, and massively for at least 20 years,” she said. “But yes, it fits the moment. We are supporting women in different senses, promoting diversity, age, skin color. So this prize in cinema is not arriving by chance.”
A small ceremony with Winslet presenting virtually was held in 2021, and a scaled-down in-person event took place last year. This year will be a bigger blowout, hosted on the beach of the Hotel Martinez where the brand traditionally takes over the top floor for its glam squad suite.
“It’s like we had a warm-up in the intensity of the ceremony,” she said of growing the event to this year’s size, alongside the Jeune Cinema dinner. A fuller slate of its spokespeople are expected to attend, including Jane Fonda, Andie MacDowell, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Leïla Bekhti, Katherine Langford and Eva Longoria, who just directed her own first film.
All nominees walk up the famous 24 steps of the Palais de Festivals ahead of the ceremony, and the winner goes through a professional photo shoot and is promoted across L’Oréal’s social channels. The brand also hosts a special screening of the winning film in its villa with invited festival guests.
In addition, L’Oréal will connect the winners with advertising agencies and producers through other events.
The recipient will collect a 20,000-euro grant, and the brand accompanies the winner throughout the year with support at other festivals. In an industry that is often about who you know, women have traditionally been shut out. As the prize grows, Viguier-Hovasse wants to create a network of people in the know.
“We hope that we can build an ecosystem in the years to come,” she said. While the award is just beginning to gain recognition as its own mark of excellence, the executive envisions a long story for the short film prize. “We want to give value to this prize to make sure that it is viewed as a real prize of the official selection, that it is really supported by the festival and seen as something serious.”
The goal is not just to have the winners’ names on the Lights prize, but in the running for the Palme d’Or. Short films are often a first step for a director, Viguier-Hovasse noted. “My vision is that we have one of our winners in the official selection very soon.”