«If I've helped anyone, that's wonderful (...) just as other directors opened doors for me (...) (But) I can't take credit for it, because these women have their own energy, they're emerging, they want to make their work and share it».
These are the words of Jane Campion, widely regarded as a pioneer of female filmmaking in contemporary cinema. She spoke them at the 77th Locarno Film Festival, where she received the Pardo d'onore Manor. The award recognized her as a model for the women directors now winning acclaim and prizes for their films. Campion was the first woman to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the only director ever nominated twice for an Academy Award for best direction—she won in 2022.
Campion's cinema remains vital today for the power of her female characters—figures wholly unlike the film heroines of earlier decades. They are often women forced to overcome the ostracism society reserves for those deemed wrong or inferior.
The two films screened at Locarno in her honor make this clear. An Angel at My Table (1990) adapts the autobiographical works of writer Janet Frame, who was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia in her early twenties. She spent years in a psychiatric hospital, enduring hundreds of electroshocks, and came close to lobotomy—until her published works began to win prizes while she was still a patient.
In Campion's vision, there is no romantic link between madness (which Frame never had) and artistic genius. Her gifts as a writer are not a symptom of illness but a way of claiming her right to exist. Rendered with a powerful physical presence—those red curls—and a fragile soul, Frame becomes a living contradiction that cinema restores to the world.
The heroine of The Piano (1993) is a creation of fiction, but unforgettable: a nineteenth-century Scottish woman who sails to New Zealand to marry a stranger. She has not spoken since age six. She loves the piano above all else. Her silence makes her appear weak and malleable, but she shows enormous courage in asserting her unbreakable will.
Again, the female character is not defined by absence (her voice) but by presence—the force of her passions. She plays piano; she loves a man who learns to respect rather than dominate her. She will overcome her second, far more brutal wound, because the richness of her inner life remains untouched.
Looking at how Campion's example has shaped directors who came after her, the 2024 Locarno Film Festival reads as a passing of the torch. The Golden Leopard went to Lithuanian director Saulė Bliuvaitė for Akiplėša (Toxic). The protagonists are two thirteen-year-old girls—figures who might have been deemed unworthy of the camera's attention only years ago. They live in a bleak Lithuanian industrial town, become friends, and dream of modeling. Marija pursues it despite a slight limp that makes other girls mock her; Kristina hates her body so much she battles anorexia.
Without mothers to guide them, they face their bodies alone. The aspirations of others mold an impossible ideal. Scene after scene insists on the contrast: the joy of adolescent friendship set against the violence of self-destruction. This is the film's greatest strength—its realism in capturing the difficult passage from childhood to adulthood. Two young women who see themselves as broken teach us to look at them instead with the respect due to those who can still write their own futures.