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Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera has sparked criticism from several Italian film organizations — including Women in Film Television and Media Italia — for
this year’s sharp drop in female directors, with only one woman-helmed film in the 20-title competition.
Regarding the Italian selection, they pointed out that: “Seven male directors represent Italian cinema in competition and out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, on the festival’s main stage. It is a one-dimensional selection: entirely male.”
More broadly, “Quality is not a divine, neutral, objective category suspended above history,” the orgs said in an impassioned appeal published on Monday in Italian newspaper La Repubblica and posted on social media. “We know full well that it is a concept that moves and evolves, and that art is a battlefield made of bodies, tears, blood and power. It is not a pure heavenly sphere where the angels of quality flutter asexually.”
The statement continued: “Each selection is the result of a gaze, a culture, an imagination. Preferences, sensitivities, limitations, mistakes and a precise editorial line. To think that quality can be separated from all this is to ignore how the cultural canon is constructed and where art originates,” it added.
“Precisely for this reason, the criteria by which we judge quality must themselves be continually questioned,” the appeal went on to note. “When, year after year, the outcome is such a heavily unbalanced representation, we cannot simply conclude that women directors ‘are not good enough.’ We must ask whether the tools through which we view cinema are still fit for the present day.”
The appeal’s signatories also comprise Italian film directors’ associations ANAC and 100autori, which are behind the event’s Giornate Degli Autori (Venice Days) sidebar; Italian directors’ guild Air3; the European Women’s Audiovisual network; and Italian documentary directors’ org Doc/it.
Beyond the glaring fact that there is just one film directed by a woman — the aptly titled drama “Woman Unknown” by Danish-Egyptian director May El-Toukhy — competing for the Golden Lion in Venice’s competition, it represents a steep drop from the roughly 29% (6 out of 21 films) female-directed films in last year’s competition.
The Venice Horizons section— dedicated to emerging voices and cutting edge works — features eight out of 19 films directed by women, repping roughly 42% of the section.
“I don’t think we can be accused of bias against women directors because, since 2000, Venice has awarded top prizes to more female directors than Cannes, Berlin or other festivals,” Barbera told Variety in an interview last week after this year’s lineup was announced.
Indeed, over the past five years, three female filmmakers have scooped the Golden Lion: Chloé Zhao for the film “Nomadland” in 2020, Audrey Diwan for “Happening” and Laura Poitras for the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” in 2022.
Last year, Italian director Maura Delpero won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize for “Vermiglio.”
Barbera further pointed out to Variety that “the three presidents of this year’s main juries are women,” starting with Maggie Gyllenhaal who will preside over the competition jury, while French director, actor and screenwriter Valérie Donzelli will chair the Horizons jury, and Italian screenwriter and director Carolina Cavalli will chair the jury for the Luigi De Laurentiis Venice Award for a debut film.
“We were hoping to find more female-directed films for competition, but fewer were submitted,” Barbera said, noting that “women-directed fiction films accounted for 24% of submissions this year, compared with 30% last year.”
Barbera added: “Unfortunately, we also found them to be of lower quality, so we weren’t able to include more in competition. That’s a great disappointment, but there should be no suspicion of any bias on our part. The only rigid criterion we follow is the quality of the films.”
He continued, “We are absolutely opposed to selecting films based on gender because we don’t believe it’s beneficial. 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. If we’ve made a mistake by not selecting a film directed by a woman, people can judge that once they’ve seen the films.”
The independently-run Venice Days sidebar, curated by Gaia Furrer, boast a lineup dominated by female directors with 14 films directed by women out of 25 titles in its main selection. That lineup opens with Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát’s English-language debut “My Notes on Mars,” starring Mackenzie Davis and Rupert Friend.
The Critics’ Week section, dedicated to first works from around the world, comprises two female directors out of seven selected features in competition.
Get ready for Barbera’s male-dominated competition selection to be a big talking point at Venice, which will run Sept. 2-12.
Pictured above (from left to right): Venice Days artistic director Gaia Furrer, Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera, Venice Critics’ Week general delegate Beatrice Fiorentino.
