Despite a fairly large female presence at a lunch on Wednesday to kick off the Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Niro was surrounded by only white men, plus the festival’s co-founder Jane Rosenthal, at his table.
As Rosenthal took to the podium at Tribeca’s Thalassa restaurant to praise the festival’s all-female “Untold Stories” category this year, all eyes were on 75-year-old De Niro’s mostly male table, with one attendee noting, “The optics are terrible.”
Following the lunch, Rosenthal admitted to Page Six that the disparity didn’t go unnoticed.
“I noticed that there were a lot of … mostly men in this room,” she told us when asked how it felt to be the only woman sitting at De Niro’s table. “That is more of what I noticed versus being here yesterday at lunch for our ‘Untold Stories,’ and it was predominantly women.
“You see where different industries, different parts of our business are not as well represented.”
Rosenthal continued to praise the festival’s “Untold Stories” program while acknowledging that there’s still work to be done in Hollywood.
“Our festival, our company, is predominantly women,” she said, “but it’s interesting, I didn’t look that at the table specifically as much as the room.”
Although De Niro’s table was starkly white and male, the rest of the event’s tables included women and people of color. Despite that, Rosenthal said more needs to be done to improve diversity within the industry and its events.
“It’s the works that we’re highlighting. It’s what we’re doing to continue to mentor people,” she shared with us. “It’s stories that are looking at other cultures that hopefully we can start to turn a corner and make a difference, but it is also about listening to people, listening to each other.”
A rep for the Tribeca Film Festival told Page Six, “Seats got changed at the last minute when people canceled, so yes one or two tables were skewed more with females or more with males.”