Chloé Zhao, the Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, has said that the US film industry is not set up to foster gender diversity.
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’s 100 top grossing films in the US were women.
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.
“What I’ve learned from making Hamnet,” said Zhao, “is that feminine leadership – and that doesn’t mean just women, it means the feminine consciousness in all people – is drawing strength from interdependence, not dominance. So it’s drawing strength from intuition, relationships, community and interdependence.
“So it doesn’t fit into the current model that we exist in, the container we exist in. It’s 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.”
The annual USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative surveys the gender, race and ethnicity of directors across the top performing US films. This year’s study recorded a considerable year-on-year decline for female directors, with 8.1% of the US’s 100 highest-grossing films helmed by women in 2025, compared with 13.4% (15 women) the previous year.
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’s followup to Past Lives, Materialists ($36.5m), and Nisha Ganatra’s Freakier Friday ($94.2m).
Author of the report, Stacy L Smith, said the findings reveal that “progress for women directors has been fleeting”.
Smith added that, “while it is tempting to think that these changes are a result of who is in the Oval Office” – in apparent reference to Donald Trump’s diversity policy rollbacks – she concluded the decline from 2024’s figures was “driven 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.”
Zhao co-wrote the screenplay for Hamnet with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the best-selling novel of the same name.
The Guardian’s film critic, Peter Bradshaw, described the film as “a deeply felt romantic fantasy”, praising it in his five-star review as a “thrilling act of creative audacity” that is “ingenious and impassioned at the same time”.
It has emerged a leading contender this Oscars season, with Zhao poised to repeat her landmark 2021 victory, when she became the second woman – and first woman of colour – to win the Academy Award for best director. Her key competition this year is likely to be Paul Thomas Anderson, for One Battle After Another, and Sinners’ Ryan Coogler. Should he win, Coogler would become the first black film-maker to win the best director Oscar.
