Two major talking points have emerged from this morning’s Venice Film Festival lineup announcement. The first is the lack of Hollywood titles—a topic that has already been widely discussed. The second is the lack of female filmmakers.
The Venice Film Festival has seen its sharpest decline in female representation in its main competition in five years, with only one woman director—May El-Toukhy, whose drama “Woman Unknown” is competing for the Golden Lion—among the 20 selected films — first image above.
This is a steep drop from last year, when six of the 21 competition films (29%) were directed by women, and female filmmakers went on to win major awards.
The imbalance has renewed criticism of Venice’s gender representation, particularly because women directors have consistently won major festival awards in recent years, including Golden Lions for Audrey Diwan and Laura Poitras, as well as multiple Jury and Screenplay prizes. Variety and Screen have both weighed in, but what does Venice Film Festival boss Alberto Barbera have to say about it?
Barbera has long opposed quotas, arguing that selections should reflect the quality of submissions rather than gender. He has now reiterated that stance in a new interview with Variety.
In the sit-down, Barbera defended the festival’s selection process by insisting that the only film directed by a woman in competition was included because “she’s the only one we found of adequate quality to compete internationally,” rejecting any suggestion of gender bias. He explained that the festival had hoped to include more women-directed films, but “fewer were submitted” this year—24% of submissions compared with 30% the previous year—and added, “Unfortunately, we also found them to be of lower quality, so we weren’t able to include more in competition.”
While calling that “a great disappointment,” he maintained that “there should be no suspicion of any bias on our part.” He emphasized that “the only rigid criterion we follow is the quality of the films” and said the festival is “absolutely opposed to selecting films based on gender because we don’t believe it’s beneficial,” arguing that “it’s humiliating for women if they’re thought to have been chosen because they’re women rather than because they made a good film.”
Cannes had five female-directed films in competition this year, yet its festival director, Thierry Frémaux, still had to field nonstop questions about the issue.
Feminist groups, including “Collective 50/50,” remain unconvinced. They argue that Cannes and Venice cannot claim to represent global filmmaking while “the absence of women remains so visible in its most prestigious selection.”
And yet, progress has undeniably been made. In the first 73 years of the Cannes Film Festival, only one female director won the Palme d’Or: Jane Campion for “The Piano” (1993). In the last five years alone, there have been two winners—Julia Ducournau for “Titane” (2021) and Justine Triet for “Anatomy of a Fall” (2023).
The same goes for Venice, which awarded the Golden Lion to female directors in three consecutive years this decade: Chloé Zhao for “Nomadland” (2020), Audrey Diwan for “Happening” (2021), and Laura Poitras for “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (2022).
The fact is that some people believe film festivals and awards bodies should adopt gender quotas. To them, who made the film can matter as much as the film itself. As Frémaux and Barbera state, progress toward greater inclusion is important, but it should not come at the expense of artistic standards.