As a festival of Gallic cinema opens in the UK, women – both on screen and behind the camera – are now in France's cultural vanguard

Half a century has passed since a group of mostly young and almost exclusively male directors electrified the culture-starved, postwar public with what would become known as nouvelle vague films.

Using handheld cameras and with a shortage of both money and celluloid, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette – among others – created a golden age of French cinema.

Their influence spread far. The American director Martin Scorsese once said: "The French New Wave has influenced all film-makers who have worked since, whether they saw the films or not. It submerged cinema like a tidal wave."

Later Agnès Varda, a photographer turned filmmaker, would become a leading member of the movement, but the female stars of the Nouvelle Vague were the actors; Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Fanny Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, Anna Karina ...

More than 50 years on, French cinema is still part of the country's exception culturelle. And a new "new wave" is under way, as an increasing number of women stamp their influence, on and off screen.

The evidence will be on view in London and elsewhere in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema film festival, which begins this week. The French Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image Animée says the country's film industry is undergoing a feminine renaissance. According to its research, 23% of feature-length films were directed by women last year, up from 18.4% in 2008.

Comparative figures are harder to establish elsewhere. In the US, a study commissioned by the Sundance film festival and Women in Film found that female directors were depressingly under-represented in Hollywood, though more active in independent films. Between 2002 and 2013, only 4.4% of the most successful films were directed by women, its survey found.

Even at Sundance, which prides itself on gender equality, women represented fewer than a third of workers on the 820 narrative and documentary films that have featured in the festival since 2002 (though, in 2013, the balance was being redressed, with half the films in the festival's dramatic section directed by women).

Isabelle Giordano, executive director of UniFrance Films, which promotes the country's film industry abroad, commenting on a recent survey which found around 25% of film producers in France were women, compared with around 3% in the US, suggested this was very much part of the French exception culturelle.

"I don't know why it should be so, but it is. We have been told that in other countries, women have difficulty raising the money to make films, which isn't particularly the case in France, so maybe this is why. And maybe it reflects French society, where we have a lot of working women. In any case, France is a good country for women in all aspects of the film business."

Until now, the British cinemagoing public has proven stubbornly resistant to the charms of French movies, Giordano said. She is hoping this year's selected Rendez-Vous films will shift attitudes the other side of the Channel.

"They all tell stories in an original way that is very different to what Hollywood offers," she said. "We'd like British cinemagoers to come and see something they may not have seen before; even if it's a common theme, it's often treated in a different way in a French film."

Among the festival offerings is Les Beaux Jours (Bright Days Ahead) featuring one of the original nouvelle vague stars, Fanny Ardant, who after 60 films, 25 theatre runs and more than a dozen television series, is a grande dame of French cinema. Directed by Marion Vernoux, the film opens the festival on Wednesday and will be followed by a Q&A with the actress and the director.

The movie's central theme will be familiar to those who have seen Hollywood's "cougar" films: older, recently retired woman has an affair with younger, sexually voracious man.

Vernoux's direction and Ardant's touch, however, transform the subject into a delightful, touching and funny story that avoids plummeting into cliche and stereotype.

"A cougar? I most certainly am not. Good grief!" Ardant told the Observer.

Ardant was discovered by international audiences in 1981, when she starred opposite Gérard Depardieu in La Femme d'à côté (The Woman Next Door), directed by François Truffaut (with whom Ardant had the first of her three daughters), but British film-goers will remember her more recent portrayal of opera diva Maria Callas in Franco Zeffirelli's 2002 film, Callas Forever.

Another film featuring in the festival is Violette, starring Emmanuelle Devos, a biographical drama about feminist writer Violette Leduc, who was encouraged and supported by Simone de Beauvoir (played by Sandrine Kiberlain), and who mixed with Albert Camus, Jean Genet and Jean Cocteau.

The films, all due for release in the UK this year, include Je m'appelle Hmmm ... (My Name is Hmmm ...), the directing debut of Agnès Troublé, better known as fashion designer Agnès B. Quite what British audiences will make of the bleak, occasionally impenetrable and frequently bizarre film – panned by French critics – about a young girl who runs away with a Scottish lorry driver to escape being sexually abused by her good-for-nothing father, is anyone's guess.

9 Mois Ferme (Nine Month Stretch), a lively and original comedy, recounts the plight of an ambitious and uptight judge who, after getting drunk at a new year party, discovers she is pregnant by a hardened on-the-run criminal being hunted by police.

None of the French actors who spoke to the Observer complained of a lack of significant roles for women in Gallic films, a frequent lament across the Atlantic.

Kiberlain, who won acclaim for her portrayal of Simone de Beauvoir and a César – the French equivalent of an Oscar – for her, at times hilarious, interpretation of the workaholic, friendless judge in 9 Mois Ferme, said: "Personally, I feel I've been very lucky. There are times when all you get are bad scripts and others when all you get are good. Recently, I've been getting all good ones."

Speaking to the Observer before travelling to London for the festival, the César-winning Ardant admitted she had enjoyed a long and successful career and had "no regrets but a little remorse".

"I do feel that I have been rather egotistical and I rue not having been one of those people in Italy or Germany struggling for something. I have a certain sympathy for those guys in Colombia, what are they called? The Farc."

It is difficult to know if Ardant is serious. Probably not. She has form for making mischief in interviews with contrary and provocative declarations.

"I once convinced a journalist that my father was the star of Battleship Potemkin and I was the baby in the pram that rolls down the steps," she says with a giggle. "Even though it must have been obvious I wasn't even born when the film was made. Still, I like being a contrarian, saying everything and its opposite."

Not surprising, then, that Ardant was having none of the nouvelle vague feminine idea being promoted by Rendez-Vous organisers.

"I detest the whole notion of films made by women, for women, starring women," she says, adding: "Perhaps it was my generation, but I was never a feminist: I found it all too narrow.

"I like the woman I play in Les Beaux Jours. She's not a misfit or a victim, she is intelligent and she doesn't fit into the usual boxes. She likes life, likes smoking, drinking, eating and is independent.

"I like her character. She is uncompromising... and so am I."

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema runs from 23-30 April and will feature screenings in London, Bristol, Cambridge, Canterbury, Nottingham and Oxford