But by at least some metrics, Cannes following a canceled 2020 festival, a much-diminished 2021 edition and a triumphant 2022 return  is finally all the way back.

Lets just say its gotten very hard to get restaurant reservations again, says Christine Vachon, the veteran producer and longtime collaborator of Todd Haynes.

When the 76th Cannes Film Festival opens Tuesday with the premiere of Jeanne du Barry, a historical drama by Maïwenn starring Johnny Depp, the gleaming Cote dAzur pageant can feel confident that it has weathered the storms of the pandemic and the perceived threat of streaming. (Netflix and Cannes remain at an impasse.)

Last years festival, a banner one by most judgments, produced three Oscar best-picture nominees (Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis and the Palme dOr winner Triangle of Sadness ), again proving Cannes as the premiere global launching pad for films big and small.

A BLOCKBUSTER CANNES

This years festival is headlined by a pair of marquee premieres: Martin Scorseses Osage Nation 1920s epic Killers of the Flower Moon, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, and James Mangolds Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, starring Harrison Ford in his final performance as the character.

But as blockbuster as Cannes can be, even those films suggest the wide spectrum of cinema on hand. Both Scorsese and Mangold were first in Cannes decades ago to premiere their early breakthrough films in the Directors Fortnight sidebar. Scorsese with 1973s Mean Streets, Mangold with 1995s Heavy.

This time, though, theyll debut much bigger films, sure to be the hottest tickets on the Croisette. Scorsese has his $200 million epic for Apple TV+. And Mangold will premiere, as he says, a more splendiferous project than his minimalist debut.

The Indy celebration will include a tribute to Ford. He, along with Michael Douglas, will be given honorary Palme dOrs. To Mangold, its a chance for Ford to embrace the franchises international following. The Indiana Jones films essence, the director says, is rooted in golden-age cinema.

These are things where youre taking your guidance from the classics, Mangold says. Thats something thats really appreciated by the French about American cinema. In many ways, they revere the old pictures more than even the audience in the United States do. That makes it a really wonderful platform.

A RECORD HIGH FOR FEMALE FILMMAKERS

This year, 21 films are competing for the Palme dOr, which will be decided by a jury led by last years winner, Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund. Seven are directed by women, a new high for Cannes in its nearly eight decades of existence. Among the most anticipated is Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwachers La Chimera, starring Josh OConnor and Isabella Rossellini.

The festival, running through May 27, will unspool against the backdrop of labor unrest on both sides of the Atlantic. France has been beset in recent months by protests over pension reforms, including raising the retirement age. In the U.S., screenwriters are on strike to seek better pay in the streaming era.

The prospect of a prolonged work stoppage could potentially drive up prices for finished films at Cannes, the worlds top movie market. Among the titles seeking distribution is Haynes May December, which stars Natalie Portman as a journalist who embeds with a couple (Julianne Moore, Charles Melton) once renown for their age discrepancy.

Though arthouses have struggled to match the box-office recovery at multiplexes, Vachon, a producer on May December, says her company, Killer Films, and the indie stalwart Haynes are accustomed to pivoting endlessly and finding opportunities no matter what the sea winds bring.

AUTEURS AND A-LISTERS

As usual, this years competition lineup returns plenty of Cannes heavyweights, including Hirokazu Kore-eda (Monster), Wim Wenders (Perfect Days), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (About Dry Grasses), Ken Loach (The Old Oak) and Nanny Moretti (A Brighter Tomorrow).

Jonathan Glazers The Zone of Interest, shot in Auschwitz, is one of the festivals most eagerly awaited films. Its his first since 2013s Under the Skin. Pedro Almodóvar will premiere the short Strange Way of Life, with Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke. Wes Anderson, flanked by another starry ensemble, will debut Asteroid City.

Theres also the upcoming HBO series The Idol, from Euphoria filmmaker Sam Levinson starring the Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp; Firebrand with Alicia Vikander as Catherine Parr and Judd Law as Tudor King Henry VIII; and the Pixar movie Elemental, which closes the festival.

Steve McQueen, the 12 Years a Slave filmmaker, will debut the longest film playing at Cannes and one of its most thought-provoking. Occupied City, which McQueen made with his wife, Dutch author Bianca Stigter, is a four hour-plus documentary that combines narration detailing violent incidents across Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation with present-day footage from those locations.

McQueen, too, began his feature filmmaking career at Cannes. His 2008 debut, Hunger, won the Camera dOr, a prize for best first film. Its never as good as the first time, McQueen says.

But its the most important film festival, continues McQueen. Our film is asking questions. This is where you want to premiere films that challenge and films that ask questions. Youre right on the front line.

POTENTIAL BREAKTHROUGHS

While many eyes will be on reactions to the new Scorsese or Asteroid City, Cannes will, as it does every year, bring new directors to wider film audiences. Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sys Banel & Adama is the rare first feature in Palme competition.

Argentine filmmaker Rodrigo Moreno, 50, will be making his first trip to Cannes with The Delinquents, a heist drama sprinkled with existentialism and cinematic flourishes. Its one of the highlights of the Un Certain Regard section.

The film took Moreno five years to make, partially because of the pandemic. But its Cannes selection is a long time coming in another way. Morenos first feature as a solo director was invited to both Un Certain Regard and main competition at Berlin. The producers chose Berlin.

At this point of my career. Im focused on: If this allows me to keep on working and make the next film, to me, thats OK. Its the only thing I really want, says Moreno.

The shooting of this film spanned almost five years, which is crazy, he adds. But the nice side of that is that every year, I had to shoot. The one thing I knew was that a new year began, and I had to shoot. And the following, I had to shoot.

The animosity between Korean men and women has reached a point where some women are outright refusing to date, marry and have kids with men a phenomenon known as the 4B movement.

As a Korean feminist scholar living in the U.S., Ive followed this gender war from afar as I conducted research on contemporary Korean gender politics.

However, I also became embroiled in it myself after my research on Korean masculinity was published by CNN.

The article described foreign women who traveled to Korea after becoming enamored of the idea of dating Korean men from watching Korean television dramas. I pointed out that since the tourists fantasies were based on fictional characters, some of them ended up disappointed with the Korean men they dated in real life.

The article was about racial politics and the masculine ideals. But some Korean readers thought that I was simply criticizing Korean men for not being romantic and handsome enough. One enraged Korean man commented that I was an ugly feminist.

But this was tame in comparison to what women living in South Korea have endured in recent years.

Extreme misogyny and a feminist backlash

Over the past couple of decades, there have been flash points in this gender war.

In 2010, Ilbe, a right-wing website that traffics in misogyny, started attracting users who peppered the forums with vulgar posts about women.

Then in 2015, an online extremist feminist group named Megalia arose. Its goal was to fight back by demeaning Korean men in ways that mirrored the rhetoric on sites like Ilbe.

A year later, a man who had professed his hatred of women murdered a random woman in a public bathroom near a Seoul subway station. He was eventually sentenced to decades in prison, but the lines were quickly drawn. On one side were feminists, who saw misogyny as the underlying motive. On the other side were men who claimed that it was merely the isolated actions of a mentally ill man. The two groups violently clashed during competing protests at the site of the murder.

A backdrop of digital sex crimes

However, none of these events have elicited as much public controversy as the steep rise in digital sex crimes. These are newer forms of sexual violence facilitated by technology: revenge porn; upskirting, which refers to surreptitiously snapping photos under womens skirts in public; and hidden cameras used to film women having sex or undressing.

In 2018, there were 2,289 reported cases of digital sex crimes; in 2021, the number snowballed to 10,353.

In 2019, there were two major incidents that involved digital sex crimes.

In one, a number of male K-pop stars were indicted for filming and circulating videos of women in group chatrooms without their consent.

A few months later, Koreans were shocked to learn about what became known as the Nth Room Incident, during which hundreds of perpetrators mostly men committed digital sex crimes on dozens of women and minors.

They tended to target poorer women sex workers, or women who wanted to make a few bucks by sharing anonymous nude photos of themselves. The perpetrators either hacked into their social media accounts or approached these women and offered them money, but asked for their personal information so they could transmit the funds. Once they obtained this information, they blackmailed the women by threatening to reveal their sex work and their nudes to their friends and family.

Since sex work and posting nude images of yourself online are illegal in Korea, the women, fearing arrest or being ostracized by friends and family, complied with the perpetrators demands to send even more compromising images of themselves. The men would then swap these images in chatrooms.

And yet a 2019 survey conducted by the Korean government found that large swaths of the population blamed women for these sex crimes: 52% said that they believed sexual violence occurs because women wear revealing clothes, while 37% thought if women experienced sexual assault while drunk, they are partly to blame for their victimization.

In other words, a significant percentage of the Korean population believes that female sexuality is the problem not the sexual violence.

Government policy lays the groundwork

Digital sex crimes are too widespread to lay the blame at the feet of a handful of bad actors.

To me, part of the problem stems from the long history of gendered citizenship.

Korean feminist scholar Seungsook Moon has written about the ways in which the government created one track for men and another for women as the country sought to modernize in the second half of the 20th century:

Men were mobilized for mandatory military service and then, as conscripts, utilized as workers and researchers in the industrializing economy. Women were consigned to lesser factory jobs, and their roles as members of the modern nation were defined largely in terms of biological reproduction and household management.

Although these policies are no longer officially carried out, the underlying attitudes about gender roles remain embedded in Korean life and culture. Women who veer from being mothers and housewives expose themselves to public and private backlash.

The government has created gender quotas in certain industries to try to unravel this system of gendered citizenship.

For instance, some government jobs have minimum gender quotas for new hires, and the government encourages the private sector to implement similar policies. In historically male-dominant industries, such as construction, there are quotas for female hires, while in historically female-dominant industries, such as education, there are male quotas.

In some ways, this has only made things worse. Each gender feels as if the other is receiving special treatment due to these affirmative action policies. Resentment festers.

The generation that has given up

Today, the sense of competition between young men and women is exacerbated by the soaring cost of living and rampant unemployment.

Called the N-Po Generation, which roughly translates as the generation that has given up, many young South Koreans dont think they can achieve certain milestones that previous generations took for granted: marriage, having kids, finding a job, owning a home and even friendships.

Although all genders find themselves discouraged, the act of giving up has caused more problems for women. Men see women who forgo marriage and having kids as selfish. And when they then try to compete against men for jobs, some men become incensed.

Many of the men who have become radicalized commit digital sex crimes to take revenge on women who, in their view, have abandoned their duties.

Ultimately, the competitive dynamic created by the Korean governments embrace of gendered citizenship has stoked the virulent gender war between Korean men and women, with digital sex crimes used as ammunition.

The 4B movement, whereby Korean women forgo heterosexual dating, marriage, and childbirth, represents a radical escalation of the gender war by seeking to create an online and offline world devoid of men. Rather than engaging in altercations, these women are refusing to interact with men, period.

Digital sex crimes are a global problem

To be sure, digital sex crimes are not unique to Korea.

When I teach my college class on digital sex crimes in the U.S., Im surprised by how many of my students admit that theyve been victims of digital sex crimes, or knew of it happening at their high schools. And at the National Womens Studies Associations annual conference in 2022, I watched feminist activists and scholars from all over the world present their findings about digital sex crimes back home.

Since each country has its own cultural context for the rise in digital sex crimes, there isnt a single solution to solve the problems. But in South Korea, continuing to unravel the system of gendered citizenship could be part of the solution.

Min Joo Lee is a Postdoctoral fellow, Indiana University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Households added $148 billion in overall debt, bringing the total to $17.05 trillion, according to a report released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Monday. Balances are now $2.9 trillion higher than just before the pandemic.

Consumers typically build up more credit-card debt at the end of the year, during the holiday season, and then reduce those balances at the start of the following year, sometimes with the help of tax refunds. But for the first time in 20 years, that wasnt the case this year, suggesting some households are under strain from higher prices and may be relying on credit cards to maintain their spending. 

Credit card balances were flat in the first quarter, at $986 billion, bucking the typical trend of balance declines in first quarters, researchers wrote in the report. 

The overall delinquency rate remained low by historical levels, at 2.6%. But the share of debt that became delinquent meaning it was at least 30 days late is rising for most loan types, including credit cards and auto debt.

Many households took advantage of federal stimulus payments and forbearance programs for student loans and other debt to build up savings and pay down credit-card debt and other loans during the pandemic. Some of that was reversed as consumers resumed more normal spending patterns, including traveling and going out to restaurants. 

Student loan delinquencies, however, have remained flat, with the federal forbearance on payments and interest still in place. Younger borrowers, who have been struggling more to keep up with debt payments, could face even more pressure after student loan payments are resumed, New York Fed researchers said. 

Mortgage debt trends

Mortgage originations dropped sharply in the first quarter, to $324 billion, the lowest seen since the second quarter of 2014. That was after a period dubbed the taper tantrum, when mortgage rates spiked because investors became concerned the Fed would suddenly end its asset purchases. 

In another sign that consumers are tapping into available credit: Balances on home equity lines of credit increased by $3 billion at the start of the year, rising for the fourth straight quarter after declining for nearly 13 years. Some borrowers who locked in lower mortgage rates may prefer to tap into their equity through a line of credit instead of refinancing their mortgages into a higher rate, New York Fed researchers said.

Still, there were some signs that many households became better positioned to withstand financial challenges during the pandemic, especially by refinancing their mortgages to significantly reduce their monthly payments.

In a separate blog post, New York Fed researchers said that 14 million mortgages were refinanced between the second quarter of 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2021, during which $430 billion of home equity was extracted through cash-out refinances. 

About 64% of these mortgages were rate refinances, where balances increased by less than 5% of the total loan amount. That led to an average payment reduction of $220 monthly for those borrowers.

The mortgage refinancing boom is over, but its impact will be seen for decades to come, said Andrew Haughwout, director of household and public policy research at the New York Fed.