“Cinema is a system of power, and that power remains predominantly male.” This was the opening declaration of the two-day, online Global Summit on Gender Equality in Cinema, convened on 6 and 7 May by CIMA (the Spanish Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media), marking its 20th anniversary.

Bringing together voices from all over the world, the summit tackled policy failures (as well as some promising examples moving forward), persistent stereotyping and structural violence against women in the film industry. The first round-table, “Who Gets to Make Films? From Policy to Practice”, moderated by Alexia Muiños Ruiz, gave the floor to three speakers who offered data from their respective contexts: the picture that emerged was hopeful and alarming at the same time.

Fabienne Silvestre, co-founder of the French think tank Lab Femmes de Cinéma, presented findings from a 2025 study covering 36 European countries. The numbers speak for themselves: upon graduation from film school, one in two students is a woman, but that figure drops to one in four by the time a first feature is made, and one in six by the third. “It is a kind of slow evaporation. Women don't disappear overnight; they are gradually pushed out at every single step of their career – and not for lack of talent, but because of excess discrimination.”

Across Europe, women directed 24.6% of films in 2024, up from 19.2% in 2015. This means that there has been some real progress, but it has been very slow and the trajectory has not even been a straight line. During some years, the figures even regressed. The headline statistic that reverberated throughout the summit shows that, at the current rate, gender parity won't be reached until 2066.

The best-performing countries share one common denominator: bold policies. Austria achieves around 33%-36% of female-directed films, while in Spain, 25.9% of features were directed or co-directed by a woman in 2023. The French situation is peculiar: its parity bonus, introduced in 2019, stalled in 2024, with only one-third of productions qualifying; as a consequence, from 2027, films that fail to meet parity standards will be penalised financially, although this is a one-off measure.

Zanele Mthembu, chair of the board at Sisters Working in Film & Television (SWIFT) in South Africa, shifted the focus. In Africa, the film sector remains a largely informal industry. A 2023 UNESCO report found that only 44% of African countries have a film commission, and women represent under 10% of practitioners across Central, East and West Africa. In addition, in South Africa specifically, gender-based violence has been declared a national crisis: SWIFT's own 2017 survey found that nearly 78% of women in film and TV had experienced gender discrimination. Protective legislation exists, but the industry's informal nature means that it is rarely enforced on set.

Lyara Oliveira, of Instituto + Mulheres and SPCine, presented the ambitious model in Brazil, which goes beyond gender to explicitly target black women, indigenous people and trans professionals. Since 2019, every public funding call by SPCine has included affirmative action criteria: extra points are awarded for underrepresented groups, and there is a requirement for 50% of funded projects to place someone from those groups in a creative decision-making role. A key finding is that diversifying the selection committees changed which projects got funded, proving that representation behind the table matters as much as representation on screen. The model has since influenced federal-level policy across Brazil.

The summit's second round-table, “Representation Matters: Challenging Stereotypes on Screen”, moderated by Femi Otitoju, examined how stereotypes continue to dominate the portrayal of marginalised identities. Speakers included Salima Jirari (Spain); Melanie Iredale, of Reclaim the Frame (UK); Gerylee Polanco, of Killary CineLab (Colombia); and Lee Meyerhoff, of Film Fatales (USA). They each presented initiatives that began as personal projects and grew into broader collective networks, all united by a common conviction: that shifting who tells stories, and where they are told from, is the only way to shift what stories get told.

The consensus was blunt: progress is real, but reversible. Economic downturns, political shifts and policy rollbacks can undo years of gains. “Equality in cinema does not move forward on its own,” CIMA stated; “it has to be protected and defended.”