Venice Chief Alberto Barbera Under Fire for Lack of Female Directors in Competition: ‘It Is a One-Dimensional Selection’
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- Six Italian and European film organizations — including Women in Film Television and Media Italia, ANAC, 100autori, Air3, the European Women's Audiovisual Network, and Doc/it — published an appeal in La Repubblica calling this year's Venice competition "entirely male" and condemning the selection as "one-dimensional," with seven male directors representing Italian cinema across competition and out-of-competition slots on the main stage.
- Only 1 of 20 competition films is directed by a woman — Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May El-Toukhy's drama "Woman Unknown" — down from roughly 29% (6 of 21) female-directed films in last year's competition, according to the organizations.
- Barbera defended the lineup in a Variety interview, arguing that women-directed fiction submissions fell to 24% this year from 30% last year and that those submitted were "of lower quality," while emphasizing that selecting films by gender would be "humiliating for women"; he also noted that all three main jury presidents are women — Maggie Gyllenhaal, Valérie Donzelli, and Carolina Cavalli.
- The independently run Venice Days sidebar, curated by Gaia Furrer, tells a sharply different story: 14 of its 25 main-selection films are directed by women, opening with Lili Horvát's "My Notes on Mars," while the Horizons section features 8 of 19 female-directed films (roughly 42%).
- The appeal argued that "quality is not a divine, neutral, objective category" and challenged curators to question whether their evaluative tools are "still fit for the present day," framing the imbalance as a structural editorial problem rather than a pipeline issue.
- Over the past five years, three female filmmakers have won the Golden Lion — Chloé Zhao for "Nomadland" (2020), Audrey Diwan for "Happening," and Laura Poitras for "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" (2022) — a record Barbera cited to push back on bias allegations.
- The 82nd Venice Film Festival runs Sept. 2–12, and the dispute over the male-dominated competition lineup is expected to be a central talking point throughout the event.
Why it matters: With the competition falling from 29% to 5% female-directed films in a single year, the controversy exposes a widening gap between Venice's main competition — where the Golden Lion is awarded — and its independently curated sidebars, where female representation is strong. Barbera's argument that fewer and weaker women-directed submissions drove the drop puts the burden back on the supply side, but the coalition of six organizations argues the imbalance reveals an editorial blind spot in how "quality" is judged at the top of the festival.
