Venice Put One Woman in Competition. Its Own Horizons Lineup Says That Was a Choice

Horizons, the section for emerging and formally adventurous work, is curated by Barbera as well. It broke its own record this year: eight of its nineteen films are directed by women, roughly forty-two per cent.

Two of those eight — Alina Marazzi's La Ragazza Con La Leica and Rubaiyat Hossain's The Difficult Bride — were understood to have been considered for a move up into competition at some point. Anuparna Roy is back in the section with Lovers in the Blue Night, a year after winning its best first film and best director prizes for Songs of the Forgotten Trees.

Venice Days, the sidebar curated by Gaia Furrer and run independently, went further: fourteen of its twenty-five films are directed by women. It opens with Lili Horvát's English-language debut My Notes on Mars, with Mackenzie Davis and Rupert Friend.

So the films exist. They were submitted, watched, and selected — by the same person, in the same building, for the same festival, in the same month. What did not happen is the twenty-odd slots where the Golden Lion is decided.

That is the gap the supply argument cannot cover. If the pool had thinned to the point where one film was all that could be found, Horizons would not be at a record. And if the quality were the issue, it is strange that two of the films judged good enough for a competition conversation ended up in the section that does not have the prize.

Photos: EthicalComics · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source; Tomasz Leśniowski · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

The winners were not a courtesy

One more count, because it answers the quietest version of the objection — the idea that women were being waved through and are now being held to the real standard.

In 2021, Audrey Diwan won the Golden Lion for Happening, Jane Campion took the Silver Lion for The Power of the Dog, and Maggie Gyllenhaal won best screenplay for The Lost Daughter. In 2022, Laura Poitras won the Golden Lion for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Alice Diop the grand jury prize for Saint Omer. In 2023, Agnieszka Holland took the special jury prize for Green Border. In 2024, Maura Delpero won the grand jury prize for Vermiglio and Dea Kulumbegashvili the special jury prize for April. Then last year's two.

Five consecutive editions in which the women in competition left with major awards. Juries change every year and they are not Barbera's, which is the point: independent panels kept reaching the same verdict about the films he had put in front of them.

Cannes, over the same five editions, held a steadier line without ever reaching parity — five women-directed films in competition in 2022, seven in 2023, four in 2024, a record seven in 2025, five again this year — and gave the Palme d'Or to Julia Ducournau for Titane and Justine Triet for Anatomy of a Fall.

Photo: ManoSolo13241324 · CC0 · source

What the one film is

Woman Unknown is about a young housemaid with a shameful secret, on the point of marrying the wealthy widower she works for. El-Toukhy's last feature, Queen of Hearts, won the audience award at Sundance and was about a successful lawyer who begins an affair with her teenage stepson — a filmmaker who is drawn to women whose respectability is a held breath.

It is a good film to be carrying a competition. It should not have to carry it alone, and the lineup two sections away is the evidence that it did not have to.

• Queen of Hearts2019 · May el-Toukhy
• The Power of the Dog2021 · Jane Campion
• The Lost Daughter2021 · Maggie Gyllenhaal
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed2022 · Laura Poitras
• Saint Omer2022 · Alice Diop
• Green Border2023 · Agnieszka Holland
• Vermiglio2024 · Maura Delpero
• Titane2021 · Julia Ducournau
• Anatomy of a Fall2023 · Justine Triet