French Filmmakers Celebrate Women’s Day With Academy

GIRLS ALOUD: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences celebrated International Women’s Day on Friday with a lunch in Paris celebrating its Gold Fellowship for Women, granted to award-winning French director Maïmouna Doucouré. Veteran actress Claudia Cardinale joined directors including Agnès Varda, Danièle Thompson, Julie Delpy, Diane Kurys and Marjane Satrapi at the event at the Meurice hotel held in partnership with Swarovski. The Austrian crystal-maker supports the one-year fellowship for female filmmakers or executives, which comes with a cash prize of 20,000 euros. Dawn Hudson, chief executive officer of the Academy, noted it was the third such fellowship granted in one year as part of Action: The Academy Women’s Initiative, which seeks to support inclusion and increase representation of women within the organization and the film community at large. Hudson has been leading efforts to diversify the Academy’s membership during a tumultuous period that saw the launch of an #OscarsSoWhite social-media campaign in 2015 due to a lack of diversity among its acting nominees. “I definitely think things have been changing. I arrived at the Academy eight years ago, and in that time, every year we have made improvements,” Hudson told WWD. “We’re reaching out to different artists, we’re reaching out to women,

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