Three films at this year's Cannes Film Festival are drawing attention for their focus on women in crisis, each arriving from a different country and a different directorial voice, and each rooted in years of on-the-ground research.
Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo's Ben'Imana represents more than a decade of preparation. The Rwandan filmmaker spent years listening to survivors of the 1994 genocide and hearing confessions from those who participated in the killings, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Her debut feature centers on Vénéranda, a survivor who leads community reconciliation efforts while struggling to extend the same compassion to her own teenage daughter, who becomes unexpectedly pregnant. The film explores forgiveness, tradition, and gender roles through a community of women, many of whom Dusabejambo cast as non-professional actors drawn from those same conversations.
"They bring in something that is real," Dusabejambo said of those women. She also described her approach to drawing out their performances: "I was also trying to find their language: How do they talk about themselves? How do they talk about this history without being too reductive?"
She knew from the start that a Rwandan film centered almost entirely on women would feel different, but she was not satisfied letting that be the sole defining quality. "The place women have in Rwanda is one of influence and power that is indirect, but it's a matriarchal society — and there are women who participated in the killings," she said. "In this mothering space where we all met, I wanted to go through the women's hearts and find the heartbeat."
Sara Ishaq's The Station, screening in Critics' Week, takes place at a women-only gas station in Yemen whose owner has carved out a rare space of freedom inside a country at war. The station's owner, Layal, offers contraband lingerie and conversation alongside rationed fuel, and the film builds from easy warmth to something considerably darker as the civil conflict outside presses in. The central tension arrives when Layal learns she must pay a fee to keep her 12-year-old brother at home rather than send him to fight. Variety noted the film as one of the buzzier titles in its section and observed that Cannes' main competition had once again passed over Arab content.
Laila Marrakchi's Strawberries, screening in Un Certain Regard, follows a group of Moroccan women hired as seasonal laborers on a strawberry farm in southern Spain who decide to resist their abusive employers. Marrakchi, who first came to Cannes in 2005 with Marock, told Variety that the project began when a journalist friend was assigned a New York Times piece on a woman who had traveled to Andalusia for work and organized against exploitation once she arrived.
"For me, it was the fact that these women are so strong, so capable, so courageous," Marrakchi said. "And when I met them, I realized that I had always wanted to make a film about this type of women. Not a miserable film, but something about their strengths. They don't have any skills, you know, they don't have anything. But they are strong."
Marrakchi said she and screenwriter Delphine Agut ultimately chose fiction over documentary because of the complexity of the material. The film follows its central character Hasna as the promise of a better life in Morocco collides with the conditions she actually finds on arrival.
All three films arrive at a festival where the Palme d'Or race, according to IndieWire's updated rankings as of May 17, remains open, with Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden and James Gray's Paper Tiger among the early frontrunners. The Beloved, in which Bardem stars, also appears in the contender list. Several major competition titles have not yet screened.
