Among the many talking points from this year’s Venice Film Festival lineup announcement, one stands out as especially troubling: only a single film directed by a woman made it into the competition for the Golden Lion. That film is ‘Woman Unknown’ by May el-Toukhy, a Danish-Egyptian director, about a housemaid poised to marry her wealthy, widowed employer.
The remaining 19 films in the main race were all directed by men, marking a sharp decline from recent editions. Last year, the competition included 21 films, six of which were directed by women, among them Kaouther Ben Hania, whose “The Voice of Hind Rajab” took the Grand Jury Prize, Venice’s second place honor. The year before that, six women were also in contention. In 2023, 2022, and 2021, five women were selected each year, and in 2020, the lineup featured eight films from women.
Progress at Venice has been genuine over the past decade. Over the festival’s history of 77 years, only seven women have ever won the Golden Lion, but three of those victories happened recently. Chloé Zhao won in 2020 for “Nomadland,” Audrey Diwan in 2021 for “Happening,” and Laura Poitras in 2022 for “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Since the late 2010s, women have also frequently presided over the competition jury, with Isabelle Huppert, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Lucrecia Martel, and Annette Bening all serving in that role. Before that, only five women had held the position since 1935.
This year’s situation, however, illustrates how fragile that progress can be. Artistic director Alberto Barbera, responding to criticism after the lineup announcement, insisted he was “actually desperate. I would love to be able to find more female-directed films to put in competition. But it simply was not possible, for many reasons. The number of films made by women has decreased… And the quality of the ones we saw was not such that we could put them in competition.” He described the moment as “a temporary negative situation” and expressed hope that “next year [it] will improve again, [that] we’ll get more films made by women and the quality will improve.” Barbera pointed to structural forces, saying, “We are at the end of a chain that we don’t control. There are choices made by the producers, by financiers. It’s a matter of the budgets [being given to female directors]. I’m very sorry about the situation but there was nothing we could do. We don’t want to select the competition on the basis of gender, but on the quality of the films.”
It is true that in a film industry weighed down by financial strain and risk aversion, the number of projects directed by women is falling, and Barbera cannot change that alone. But some decisions are within his control. Consider the Orizzonti section, which showcases emerging talent. There, eight of the 19 projects are directed by women. According to Variety, two of those films, Alina Marazzi’s “The Girl with the Leica” and Rubaiyat Hossain’s “The Difficult Bride,” were believed to have been under consideration for the main competition. Anuparna Roy, who won Orizzonti’s best director prize last year for her debut “Songs of Forgotten Trees,” is back with “Lovers in the Blue Night.” Why could these films not have been elevated to the Golden Lion race? If Barbera was truly desperate for female representation, wouldn’t he have found a way?
The real issue, I suspect, is not a shortage of deserving films by women, or a lack of submissions. The Orizzonti roster alone demonstrates that such films exist. Rather, many of them are not considered worthy of the main competition, a space long reserved for the male auteur. This year’s lineup includes Martin McDonagh, Danny Boyle, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong, Florian Zeller, and Werner Herzog. For these established figures, particularly those with existing relationships with the festival, the entry bar appears far lower.
Let’s address the quality question directly. Having attended Venice for several years, I can attest to having seen many very bad films by legendary male directors. Last year, Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” László Nemes’s “Orphan,” and Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine” were all in competition. In 2024, Todd Phillips’s widely criticized “Joker: Folie à Deux” competed for the Golden Lion. Are the films directed by women that could have made it into this year’s competition really worse than those clunkers?
Of course, all of this is subjective; cinema that pushes boundaries is often divisive. But isn’t that an argument for bringing more women into the selection process? If Barbera continues to rule out quotas as a means of ensuring female representation, how do we prevent another backslide? The answer, I believe, is sustained scrutiny and pressure, the same kind of spirited and continuous discourse that drove the improvements of the past decade.
Complacency often sets in after meaningful strides are taken, and that seems to be where Venice stands today. Barbera has already been questioned about the absence of female directors by virtually every major film publication. Italian film organizations have criticized the lineup. More outrage will likely follow when the festival opens in September. It is essential that it does, so that this issue remains at the forefront for Barbera as he compiles the 2027 edition.
Here’s hoping this year acts as a warning, a glimpse of what might happen if we ease up. After so much historic erasure and only a handful of recent wins that were hard fought, it is simply unfathomable that a festival like Venice could have only one film directed by a woman in competition in 2026. It must never happen again.
