Cairo International Film Festival has just signed the gender equality charter becoming the first in the Arab world to do just that.
This initiative was launched a year ago at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 with the aim to ensure that film festival juries make up for their historical gender imbalances.
The pact was signed in collaboration with French gender parity movement 5050×2020, which spearheaded the Cannes pledge.
Cannes Director Thierry Fremaux said: “We hope that it will reinforce the realisation that the world is not the same anymore. The world has changed.”
“We must question our history and our habits,” the Cannes festival director added, calling on other international film festivals to follow suit.
According to Deadline, the pledge does not set mandatory quotas for films directed by women, but promises an even gender ratio in festival management, and improving transparency around selection processes by publicly listing the members of its selection and programming teams.
So far, in just a little over a year since the pact was launched, more than 60 international film festivals have already signed up to the pledge, including Venice, Toronto, London, Rome, New York, and Berlin.
The Cairo Film Festval will take place from Wednesday, November 20 and will end on Friday, November 29.
