Venice boss says only one woman made a film good enough to compete

Alberto Barbera, the artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, was asked in July why only one of the 20 films in this year's competition had been directed by a woman. His answer, given to Variety and widely reported since, was that May el-Toukhy was "the only one we found of adequate quality to compete internationally".

Six weeks later he sat beside the woman who hands out the Golden Lion. She did not let it go.

"I guess it's just finally become clear that men make better movies than women do," Maggie Gyllenhaal said at the opening press conference of the jury she chairs, according to Screen. Then she dropped the joke. "There's a systemic problem. It's much harder for women to get their films financed."

What Barbera actually said

Barbera has never hidden his reasoning. In an interview with Screen when the line-up was announced, he said "only 25% of films submitted to the festival were by women", and that Venice had decided to be "very strict" about quality as its one criterion.

He went further. Venice, he said, had promoted films by women into competition before, and "it had a very bad response from the audience and from the press". He declined to name the two or three cases he had in mind.

The argument is that putting a weaker film into competition helps nobody, least of all the woman who made it. It is a coherent argument. It also assumes that the small committee deciding what counts as weaker is neutral, and that is exactly the assumption his critics reject.

A sharp drop, and a familiar one

The numbers make the complaint hard to wave away. Last year six of Venice's 21 competition films were directed by women. This year's announced line-up had one.

Six Italian and European industry bodies, including 100autori, ANAC and the European Women's Audiovisual Network, called it "a one-dimensional selection: entirely male", Screen reported. The same groups pointed out that Venice signed the 50/50 by 2020 gender parity pledge in 2018.

That pledge followed a year very like this one. In 2018, Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale was the only film by a woman among 21 in Venice's competition, and the line-up drew the same criticism then.

Two women, technically

The count moved late in August, when Venice added NAZA to the competition. The documentary about Gaza is co-directed by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, the filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, and it took the competition to 21 films. Barbera was quick to point out at the jury press conference that two of them now had a woman directing.

Woman Unknown premiered on 6 September. El-Toukhy's post-war Danish drama stars Mathilde Arcel as a young housemaid hiding a wartime secret, and the reviews split: Screen called it formal yet ferocious, while Variety found it an unsubtle study of sexual shame. Neither verdict settles whether it was the only film by a woman good enough to be there.

Why Gyllenhaal's question lands

Gyllenhaal is not a neutral party, and she said so. She noted that the festival had asked her to lead the jury "after the two films that I have made", AFP reported. Her first, The Lost Daughter, won the screenplay award at Venice in 2021.

Her sharpest point was a question. "Who decides what's good and valuable?"

That is the one Barbera's position cannot answer from inside the festival. Quality at Venice is a judgement made by a handful of programmers, and a committee that keeps finding most of it in films by men is either right or looking in the wrong places. Nothing Venice has published so far shows which.

What happens next

Barbera is going nowhere. In March, La Biennale renewed his mandate through the 2027 and 2028 editions. Gyllenhaal's jury announces the Golden Lion on Saturday 12 September, and two of the 21 films it can give it to were directed by women.