Venice Put One Woman in Competition. Its Own Horizons Lineup Says That Was a Choice
May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown is the only film directed by a woman competing for this year's Golden Lion. Alberto Barbera says the films were not there. The section he programmed one floor down, where a record forty-two per cent of the directors are women, is the problem with that answer.
The number is one
May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown is the only film directed by a woman in this year's Venice competition. Vogue counted the rest: nineteen films contending for the Golden Lion, all of them directed by men. Variety arrived at the same picture from the other side — one woman among the twenty titles Alberto Barbera selected.
Last year there were six, out of twenty-one, which Variety put at twenty-nine per cent. Kaouther Ben Hania was among them and took the grand jury prize for The Voice of Hind Rajab; Valérie Donzelli won best screenplay for At Work. Kathryn Bigelow, Mona Fastvold, Ildikó Enyedi and Shu Qi were in that competition too. Six to one in a single edition is the steepest fall Venice has recorded in five years.
Six Italian film organisations, among them the Italian branches of the European Women's Audiovisual Network and Women in Film Television & Media, put an open letter in La Repubblica calling the selection one-dimensional and male-dominated.
Barbera says the films were not there
His explanation, given to The Hollywood Reporter and quoted by Vogue, is worth reading in full rather than in summary, because it makes two separate claims.
"I would love to be able to find more female-directed films to put in competition," he said. "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 called it "a temporary negative situation" and said he hoped next year would improve.
The first claim is about supply. The second is about quality. Barbera has been consistent about the principle underneath both — he has rejected quotas for years, and Venice was among the last major festivals to sign the fifty-fifty parity pledge, in 2018 — and a programmer who refuses to select a film because of who directed it is holding a defensible position. I do not think the position is the problem here. The evidence is.
Photo: LucaFazPhoto · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
