Chlo\u00e9 Zhao, the Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, has said that the US film industry is not set up to foster gender diversity.<\/p>\n
Speaking at a Women in Motion talk at the Palm Springs film festival on Monday, Zhao was asked for her response to a recent study that found just nine of the 111 directors behind last year\u2019s 100 top grossing films in the US were women.<\/p>\n
Zhao is on the list with awards season favourite, Hamnet, a poetic exploration of the grief experienced by William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). The film won Buckley a Critics Choice award last weekend for her raw performance as mother struggling with the death of her son.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I\u2019ve learned from making Hamnet,\u201d said Zhao, \u201cis that feminine leadership \u2013 and that doesn\u2019t mean just women, it means the feminine consciousness in all people \u2013 is drawing strength from interdependence, not dominance. So it\u2019s drawing strength from intuition, relationships, community and interdependence.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it doesn\u2019t fit into the current model that we exist in, the container we exist in. It\u2019s difficult to come through, and I feel very lucky that I had people in power that trusted that this way of leading is needed for this story.\u201d<\/p>\n
The annual USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative surveys the gender, race and ethnicity of directors across the top performing US films. This year\u2019s study recorded a considerable year-on-year decline for female directors, with 8.1% of the US\u2019s 100 highest-grossing films helmed by women in 2025, compared with 13.4% (15 women) the previous year.<\/p>\n
Hamnet opens in the UK this Friday but was released in the US on 26 November, where it has so far earned $12m at the box office. Other notable successes on the list were Celine Song\u2019s followup to Past Lives, Materialists ($36.5m), and Nisha Ganatra\u2019s Freakier Friday ($94.2m).<\/p>\n
Author of the report, Stacy L Smith, said the findings reveal that \u201cprogress for women directors has been fleeting\u201d.<\/p>\n
Smith added that, \u201cwhile it is tempting to think that these changes are a result of who is in the Oval Office\u201d \u2013 in apparent reference to Donald Trump\u2019s diversity policy rollbacks \u2013 she concluded the decline from 2024\u2019s figures was \u201cdriven by executive decision-making that took place long before any DEI prohibitions took effect. Many of these films were greenlit and in pre-production before the 2024 election.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zhao co-wrote the screenplay for Hamnet with Maggie O\u2019Farrell, author of the best-selling novel of the same name.<\/p>\n