“With the film Babygirl, it reached its audience, strangely enough, through TikTok,” Nicole Kidman said this afternoon during one of Kering’s Women In Motion talks at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“It’s extraordinary to have that avenue for that film to be discovered,” Kidman continued, telling the audience that social media now provides filmmakers with new and exciting ways to disseminate their work.
“There are so many different ways now to reach people,” Kidman added. “ We launched at the Venice Film Festival, and they gave us extraordinary support. But we still had five months before launching in America, and it got this groundswell of support on social and TikTok and that literally made people go see the film. So you just never know how things are going to be discovered now.”
The Aussie added that she is always on the look out and willing to try her hand a new ways to “reach people who normally wouldn’t hear about things.”
Later during the session, Kidman was asked about her previous pledge to work with a femake director at least once ever 18 months. Since that declaration eight years ago, Kidman has worked with a woman filmmaker 27 times. When asked if she was surprised by the stats, Kidman was resolute: “I was going to make it happen,” she said.
“At that time, I was at a point where we were having discussions about the disparity,” Kidman said, adding that there simply weren’t many women filmmakers out there being given the opportunity to make features.
Kidman said she sought out women filmmakers like Karyn Kusama, with whom she made Destroyer (2018), and gave them her backing while also equipping them with a “force field of protection so that they can do their best work” and not feel like they only have one chance to get things right.
On women filmmakers, Kidman added that she has been heartened here in Cannes to see many films directed by women playing in competition, including Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, which she gave a brief shoutout.
“In the festival, there’s the film from Mascha Schilinski, Sound of Falling, I hear that’s magnificent,” Kidman said. “And there’s seven films by women in competition. It’s so wonderful to already be hearing about this unknown director who is being well received here and we now have a new name and we’re all wondering what’s next?”
Sound of Falling has had a lot of buzz here in Cannes. The film is Schilinski’s second feature. On the film, Deadline’s critic Damon Wise said: “Cinema is too small a word for what this sprawling yet intimate epic achieves in its ethereal, unnerving brilliance; forget Cannes, forget the Competition, forget the whole year, even — Sound of Falling is an all-timer.”
Kidman will be handed Kering’s 2025 Women In Motion Award this evening in Cannes.
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