Out of the various talking points that emerged from this year’s Venice Film Festival line-up announcement—most pressingly, where were the Oscar contenders previously rumored to be heading to the Lido?—there is one I’ve found deeply concerning: the 2026 competition roster features only one film by a woman director. This is Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown, the tale of a housemaid on the precipice of marrying her wealthy, widowed employer. The 19 other movies in contention for the Golden Lion are all helmed by men.
This marks a sharp decline from previous iterations of the showcase. Just last year, there were six women in the 21-strong competition line-up, including Kaouther Ben Hania, who took home Venice’s second-place Grand Jury prize for The Voice of Hind Rajab. There were six women-directed films in 2024, too; five each in 2023, 2022, and 2021; and a whopping eight in 2020.
Over the last decade, there has been significant progress made on this front at Venice: only seven women have ever won the Golden Lion in its 77-year history, but three of those victories have come in the past few years (Chloé Zhao for Nomadland in 2020, Audrey Diwan for Happening in 2021, and Laura Poitras for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed in 2022). Since the late 2010s, several women have also led the competition jury (Isabelle Huppert, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Lucrecia Martel, Annette Bening); before then, that particular honor had only gone to five women since 1935.
However, these successes don’t negate the situation in which the festival finds itself this year—and it’s essential that we don’t dismiss this current predicament as an anomaly.
The festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, would certainly like us to think of it as such. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in the wake of the line-up announcement, he insisted that 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 added that he believes it’s “a temporary negative situation. I hope next year [it] will improve again, [that] we’ll get more films made by women and the quality will improve. It’s difficult for us to understand. But 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.”
Yes, it’s true that in a beleaguered, uncertain, risk-averse, financially depleted movie industry, the number of women-directed projects is declining across the board and Barbera can’t change that. But other things are within his control. Look at Venice’s line-up beyond the main competition, for instance, and you’ll find a very different story—in the “Orizzonti” section, for emerging filmmakers, eight of the 19 projects are helmed by women. Per Variety, two of these films, Alina Marazzi’s The Girl with the Leica and Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride, were understood to have been considered for the main competition at some point. Then there’s Anuparna Roy, who scooped this section’s best-director prize just last year for her debut feature, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and is back with her second, Lovers in the Blue Night. Could she also have been upgraded to the main competition? If Barbera was so “desperate” for female representation, might not he have found a way to include these titles?
The issue, I think, is not that women aren’t making enough great, highly deserving films or submitting them to Venice—the Orizzonti roster makes it clear that they are—but rather, that many of these films are not being viewed as worthy of inclusion in the main competition, long the domain of the revered male auteur (this year, you’ll find Martin McDonagh, Danny Boyle, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong, Florian Zeller, and Werner Herzog on this list).
Let’s tackle the question of quality head-on: having attended the Venice Film Festival for the past few years, I have, I promise you, seen many, many very bad movies 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. The year before that, Todd Phillips’s endlessly maligned Joker: Folie à Deux was in contention for the Golden Lion, for crying out loud. For the biggest names, particularly those that have an existing relationship with the festival, the bar to enter the competition is, it seems to me at least, notably lower. Are any of the women-directed projects that could’ve made it into the competition this year and didn’t really worse than those (sorry) clangers?
In the end, all of this is, of course, subjective—boundary-pushing cinema has always been divisive. But then, does that mean more women need to be part of the selection process for Venice’s main competition? If Barbera continues to reject the prospect of quotas ensuring female representation, how do we avoid backsliding our way to a male-dominated status quo?
The answer, I believe, is with sustained scrutiny and pressure—the same spirited and continuous discourse that has brought about the progress we’ve seen over the past decade. It’s often when significant steps have been taken towards a fairer system that a kind of complacency sometimes sets in, and that is the position Venice appears to be in. But Barbera has now been quizzed about the dearth of women directors by every major film publication. A number of Italian film organizations have criticized the line-up. And more outrage will surely follow once the festival kicks off in September. It’s crucial that it does, so that this subject remains top of mind for Barbera ahead of his putting together the 2027 roster.
Here’s hoping that this year will act as a warning; a glimpse of what might happen if we take our foot off the gas. In 2026, after so much historic erasure and only a handful of recent, hard-fought wins, it’s just unfathomable that a festival like Venice can have only one woman-directed film in competition. And it must, categorically, never happen again.
