For filmmakers, screening a movie at the Cannes Film Festival is a thrilling highlight of their career.

So it was for Greta Bellamacina, the 28-year-old filmmaker and poet from Hampstead, London, whose debut movie Hurt By Paradise about a single mother’s relationship with her babysitter, was invited to screen at Cannes’ Marché du Film. The movie, which was also written by Bellamacina and Sadie Brown and stars the pair in the two lead roles, was filmed over 22 days in 2018 in London and Margate with a majority female crew and a cast including Anna Brewster, Tanya Burr and Nicholas Rowe.

But when Bellamacina arrived at the festival on Wednesday, she found she was barred from entering because she was with infant son. Organisers informed the filmmaker that her pram could not go through the main entrance, and that if she wanted to bring her son into the festival she would have to pay £260 for his accreditation. Once she agreed to do that, festival employees informed her that it would take 48 hours to process the paperwork and asked her to leave.

Cannes just turned a female filmmaker away because she is a mother