SHOOTING STARS

One of the highlights of Cannes week, Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Directors’ Showcase shines a light on the world’s best emerging film-makers. This year, the focus was on gender and opening more doors for female talent

We look at some of those who made the cut in Saatchi & Saatchi’s celebrated New Directors’ Showcase

“There’s nothing as powerful as enabling fresh blood to channel their opinions and experiences”

The essence of diversity is difference. And when we talk about diversity, what we mean is variety. Variety contributes new and different voices. It’s about different stories. It adds richness and texture. It’s that extra magic we’re always searching for.

It’s when we start celebrating differences that we stop focusing on the patterns and similarities that we use to group people and start uncovering and understanding what makes people unique and different. From planning to implementation of work, if we continuously question whether we’re being diverse we’ll begin to fully understand our audience and become better storytellers. After all, our job is to walk in the shoes of the people we communicate with on behalf of our clients.

This year, we wanted to use the New Directors’ Showcase as a platform and a tool to talk about gender and galvanise the audience to open their eyes. The beauty of the reel is in its variety. There’s nothing quite as powerful as bringing together raw talent and enabling fresh blood to channel their opinions, experiences and stories, and you can tell it’s what other people crave too as we fill our 2,000-capacity auditorium without fail every year.

The New Directors’ Showcase distilled is about welcoming, promoting and actively encouraging a wide variety of backgrounds, opinions and approaches. It stands for the differences in the world and ultimately reflects and celebrates them.