The rejection of several women from events held at the Cannes Film Festival has, it seems, by clumsy coincidence, turned into a moment of visibility for disability rights.
Several women have been refused entry into screenings at the event for wearing flat shoes instead of the obligatory high heels. Indeed such is the strength of dress code tradition at Cannes that even (male) photographers are required to wear full evening apparel as they scrum down for pictures of the stars on the fabled red carpet.
At the start of the week, this started out as a mild story about sexism and whether telling a woman how to dress was appropriate, not least at an industry event attended by highly creative and somewhat exotic people. Turning away Ms Richter, who has a partially amputated foot and cannot physically walk in high heels has turned it into something more significant with organisations such as the British Polio Fellowship accusing the organisers of discrimination.
Life is lived in small moments. Certainly, for disabled people, small victories mean a lot and are noted when we achieve something important to us that nobody else would especially care about: tying a shoelace or being able to open a jar unaided – similarly, the darker side of what we’ll call ‘experience’, is often also made up of ‘small’ disappointments. Perhaps, sometimes, we need to take the ‘Kipling view’ and “treat those two impostors just the same”.
I often think that our time on the Earth revolves around chance, coincidence and luck. I’m not a fatalist and so I don’t believe that we are here specifically to experience a set schedule of situations or meet certain people along the way but it does seem sometimes that those small moments have a definite impact on our future. What if the last ‘yes’ you heard had been a ‘no’? How would that have changed your day, week, year, life? It’s impossible to know.
Did Ms Richter realise when she put on her ‘flatties’ that she’d be helping to push polio and disability rights up the agenda at no lesser place than the Cannes Film Festival? I doubt it.
Similarly, did the doorman, who, sticking to the rules he’d been asked to rigidly police, realise that his actions wouldn’t be helping Cannes retain its chic reputation but instead be damaging it’s international credibility as a place where free, creative people meet to celebrate. Cannes, after all, is in France, a country defiantly proud of its right to free speech and the like.
One of the things that this small moment highlights is that, although such a case would be unlikely to occur in the UK, ignorance about disability remains, even in other developed countries, such as France. It isn’t though, quite fair to say that France or indeed, the Cannes Film Festival, is discriminatory against disabled people because of the actions of one poorly briefed doorman.
As in many small moments, it depends on ‘who you get on the day’. Another doorman might have acted differently and allowed Ms Richter in – and what a shame that would have been. We would then not have had the fuss surrounding her rejection and a moment of visibility and awareness about disability issues on a large stage would have been lost.
