- Race

Director(s)

The overall graphic for the race of the directors shows that a large majority of them are white (71.7%), while person of colour (24.5%) and black (3.8%) directors are in the minority. Although there are a few director ensembles, there are no combinations of directors of different races in this dataset.

Examining the race of the directors year over year, shows that there is a majority of white directors every year, with the highest proportion (81.0%) in 2016 and lowest (52.4%) in 2018. Directors of colour is the next largest group of directors by race every year, and in 2018 the number of directors of colour (42.9%) nears the number of white directors (52.4%). Black directors are in the minority every year though, with the highest proportion in 2019 (9.5%) and the lowest in both 2016 and 2017 (0.0%).

Cast Lead(s) and Character Lead(s)

There are only slight differences in the statistics for cast leads and character leads. Unsurprisingly, there is a majority of white leads (68.9%), while person of colour leads come next (21.7%), then black leads (4.7%), and finally groups of leads with different race combinations: white, black (1.9%); white, person of colour (1.9%); and white, black, person of colour (0.9%).

Like the overall graphics, the year over year graphics on race of cast and character leads are similar. The only difference is in 2017 when a white cast lead played a person of colour role. In that year, white cast leads are 84.2% and person of colour cast leads are 15.8%, while white character leads are 78.9% and person of colour character leads are 21.1%. Also, as with the directors, black cast and character leads are the minority. The proportion of black cast and character leads was only 9.5% at the most in 2016, and 0.0% at the least in 2017.

Spotlight on Minoritized Groups

To highlight the underrepresentation of black directors, cast leads, and character leads in the Palme d’Or competition, I again turned spotlights on this data. Here we can see that of all the directors, only 3.8% are black; and of all the cast leads and character leads only 7.5% are black.