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Erotic fairytale . . . Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty

At last year's Cannes film festival, there was an outcry: there was not a single woman in competition for the Palme d'Or. British director Alicia Duffy screened her debut feature in the Directors' Fortnight strand, and British directors Sophie Fiennes and Lucy Walker both took documentaries, but the main competition was an all-male affair: Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and 17 others. This year – perhaps by chance, perhaps as a corrective measure taken by the selectors – there are four female film-makers in contention: Lynne Ramsay, the British director of We Need to Talk About Kevin; Australian Julia Leigh; France's Maïwenn Le Besco; and Japan's Naomi Kawase. This is still only four out of 20 directors – depressingly, the largest number of women ever to have competed for the Palme in a single year since the festival began in 1946.

Ramsay describes this as "shocking". "There is a huge inequality in the numbers," she tells me. Le Besco, who directs and stars in her third feature, Polisse, screening in Cannes tomorrow, says she has encountered sexism in the film industry "totally and permanently". "Let's be clear – men don't like having a woman on their back, and someone who is younger than them . . . they feel unmanned, manipulated, judged. Whereas if it is a man at the helm, they feel simply that they are being directed." Ramsay's experience is different: she says she has never encountered overt sexism, but observes that when male directors are demanding and exacting "they can be seen as artistic and creative and having huge integrity, whereas women can be seen as difficult and problematic". The gender imbalance in directing, she says, is "a bit like a country not being filmed – and that country not having a voice. It really does matter."

Why the imbalance? Clearly, the film industry cannot be separated from the world at large; just as there is an imbalance in other demanding leadership roles – in politics, in business – so there is when it comes to film directing. "Women are somewhat excluded in the world, and this is just one platform," as documentary-maker Sophie Fiennes puts it. (Her film about the artist Anselm Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, screened at Cannes last year.) Fiennes says she can remember distinctly the first time she knew she wanted to become a director. "I was 14, and I was babysitting. I watched [Werner Herzog's] The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and I had an absolute clarity that this is what I wanted to do. I remember thinking, 'How can I do this?' I thought perhaps I'd have to dress dress up as a man – plus size wedding dresses cheap ; almost in a Shakespearean sense, like Viola – to enter the court."

Director Penny Woolcock, whose work includes a film of John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer, wedding dresses prom thinks the answer is straightforward. "Women have children, and I don't think it's any more complicated than that. You find that women directors either had children very young, like me – I didn't start directing until my 30s – or are childless, or can afford childcare and don't mind not seeing their children for long periods of time." She describes directing as a "brutal" regime, requiring a monomaniac attention to the project before and after filming, and a shoot that requires its director to be on set 12 hours a day, six days a week. Ramsay talks of "a vocation, an all-consuming job that becomes your life". Danish director Frederikke Aspöck, whose debut feature Out of Bounds is being given a special screening at Cannes, says there is a growing excitement about women film directors in Denmark: earlier this year, Susanne Bier's In a Better World won the Oscar for best foreign language film, while Lone Scherfig's 2009 An Education was nominated for every award going. Still, Aspöck acknowledges that without her "fantastic" husband to care for their two young children, her work would be impossible. "For some women in the film world, it becomes more attractive to have an office job in the industry discount bride dresses ," Aspöck says.

And she is right that there is no shortage of powerful women in other parts of the film world, particularly as producers and funders. (There remain very few critics: cheap black cocktail dresses cheap black cocktail dresses the Times's Kate Muir is the only first-string female critic on a quality British newspaper.) In Britain, Film4 is run by Tessa Ross, and BBC Films by Christine Langan. The major public funding body, the BFI, is run by Amanda Nevill, with Tanya Seghatchian head of its film fund. Julia Leigh, whose "erotic fairytale" Sleeping Beauty is already attracting a frisson of excitement ahead of its premiere tomorrow, says there were a significant number of women behind her film debut (she is adapting her own novel): Leigh's producer, and the purse-string-holders at the Australian funding bodies, are female. She has also had the good fortune to have been mentored by fellow Australian Jane Campion, whose The Piano is the only film by a woman to have won the Palme d'Or (and even then not outright: the accolade was shared with Kaige Chen's Farewell My Concubine). Campion "reminded me to stay attuned to my instinct plus size bridesmaids dresses , to respond energetically, to service the film, Shop Simply Dresses for cocktail dresses, short formal dresses, halter dresses, strapless cocktail dresses, and sexy mini dresses." Leigh says. "There were many occasions when I was being battered in the high seas. Her encouragement was vital comfort and ballast."

Know your chops, get respect

Mention of Campion is germane: the extent to which her career was boosted by The Piano's success at Cannes is a reminder of just how crucial a launchpad this annual gathering of the film tribes can be. Andrea Arnold had already won an Oscar for a short film when her first feature, Red Road, premiered at Cannes in 2006: the international exposure, and the fact she came home clutching the jury prize, proved extremely significant in her elevation to European arthouse royalty. (Le Besco namechecks Arnold as a role model: "She's a genius," she says – though interestingly Arnold's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights is not coming to Cannes but will instead premiere at Venice in September.)

If there are so many women producing and funding films, what is the problem with directing? Is there more to it than the demands of childcare and family? Few directors, with the exception of Le Besco, feel there is a problem when it comes to commanding authority on set. Ramsay, who was a cinematographer before she made the leap into directing, talks of "knowing your chops technically – then you tend to get respect". Woolcock laughs at herself for, as a young director, reading the journal American Cinematographer "cover to cover for three years", so that she felt she had the expertise to boss around her male directors of photography. But being a leader on set, she says, "has never been an issue" – particularly once she worked out that "you don't have to work with people you don't like".

Rachel Millward, director of Birds Eye View, a British film festival that celebrates film-making by women, 2011 wedding dresses 2011 wedding dresses thinks there is something else at play. "Yes, as a director you need to work on location, yes it's insecure, yes you have to work stupidly intensely. But that doesn't account for another inequality in the film world – that there are so few women writing for film. There is something about the industry that does have barriers; there are still things in the industry that are hard to crack for women." She talks about the fact that screenwriting demands an intense amount of work at the business level: "You have to know people, network, write for the market."

The same is true, and more so, for directors, she argues. "When it comes to raising money for a film you need vast amounts of confidence to get through all those doors, and phenomenal amounts of persuasiveness and leadership skills. And, in a wider societal way, women are not encouraged to acquire those skills. Film has a funny interplay between business and art that makes it quite different from being a painter or a novelist." Campion, asked about the issue when she brought her film Bright Star to Cannes two years ago, said: "I don't think women grow up with the world of criticism that men grow up with. It's quite harsh when they experience the world of film-making and have to develop tough skins. But they must put on their coats of armour and get going. Because we need them."

There is, perhaps, the grounds for a sliver of optimism in the face of the still-grim statistics. Britain has a growing number of internationally acclaimed film-makers: as well as Ramsay and Arnold, there is Joanna Hogg, Sam Taylor-Wood, Antonia Bird, Beeban Kidron, Phyllida Lloyd and Gurinder Chadha. Amanda Nevill, director of the BFI, talks about a "door having been opened" and a gradual change in the culture of an industry, aided by the number of women "gatekeepers" – the funders and executives. "Women are on the rise, definitely," says Ramsay. "There are many more interesting women film-makers out there, and there will be great women film-makers in the future." According to Leigh: "I'm grateful to the women who have gone before me and have proven – without a doubt – that women are more than capable of making great films, all kinds of great films." Her last remark is pointed: "I suspect," she says, "male film-makers are rarely asked how they feel about being a male director."