Italian Film Bodies Slam Venice Festival Over Lack Of Women In Lineup

Six Italian film bodies have hit out at the lack of women in the Venice Film Festival’s main film competition this year in an open letter.

The tribune, published in Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper over the weekend, follows in the wake of the festival’s unveiling of the 2026 Official Selection, in which just one film by a female director — May-el Toukhy’s Woman Unknown — made it into the 21-title main Competition.

The letter signed by 100autori, Anac, Air3, Doc/it as well as the Italian branches of the European Women’s Audiovisual Network and Women in Film Television & Media, focused on the Italian-selected titles.

It noted that Italy was represented in the prestigious Competition and Out of Competition sidebars by seven male directors but that none of their countrywomen had made the cut.

“It is a one-dimensional, male-dominated selection,” read the letter.

It added that Alina Marazzi’s The Girl with the Leica, about real-life German-Jewish war photographer Gerda Taro, and Anna Foglietta’s empty-nester couple drama Un Storia, which will both premiere in the Orizzonti sidebar, offered hope of a more balanced reflection of “humanity.”
 
“We hold them close with a breath of love, alongside the other female directors scattered throughout the festival, and alongside the hundreds of young women across every discipline in film schools, women who often outshine their male peers in terms of numbers, talent, energy, urgency, and power,” read the letter. “None of the selection committees at these schools, however, form all-female classes; instead, and rightly so, they seek a measure of human balance.”

It’s not the first time that the Venice Film Festival has been in hot water over the lack of women in competition.

There was outcry in 2018 after just one woman landed a place in competition, prompting that year’s jury president Guillermo del Toro to called on the festival to aim for a 50-50 gender split by 2020 in the main competition. The festival also signed “50/50 by 2020” festival pledge that same year, committing to more transparency and gender equality in the selection process.

In recent editions, Venice appeared to be moving in that direction. There were Golden Lions for Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), Audrey Diwan’s Happening (2021) and Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), while 2025 saw six high-profile female-directed pictures in competition led by Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab and Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee.

Venice Film Festival head Alberto Barbera told Deadline in an interview in the wake of Thursday’s announcement that he and his selection team had scouted hard for female-directed films, but that both the numbers and quality had decreased.

“The percentage of fiction films submitted by women this year was 24% against 30% last year. It’s a countertrend compared to recent years in which the number of female-directed films grew,” he said.

“This year it’s decreased. I don’t know why. It’s inexplicable because the pursuit of gender equality seemed like an unstoppable trend. Instead, the number of films has decreased, and unfortunately, the quality of the films has also decreased. Probably, the budgets available for films have decreased.

The open letter addressed the thorny question of the subjectivity of judgments of quality.  

“Quality is not some divine, neutral, or objective category hovering above history; we know full well that it is a concept that shifts and evolves. Art is a battlefield of bodies, tears, blood, and power — not some pure empyrean realm where the angels of quality flutter about, devoid of gender,” it read.

“Every selection is the product of a specific perspective, culture, and imagination, as well as preferences, sensibilities, limitations, errors, and a distinct editorial stance. To think that quality can be divorced from all this is to ignore how the cultural canon is constructed and where art originates,” it read.

“Precisely for this reason, the criteria we use to evaluate art must be constantly called into question. When, year after year, the result is such an unbalanced representation, we cannot simply conclude that female directors ‘aren’t good enough.’ We must ask ourselves whether the tools we use to view cinema are still suited to the present day.”
 
The signatories appealed to the festival to double down on its 2018 pledge to achieve parity by 2020, even if the deadline has long since expired.
 
“Eight years have passed since that signing — six since the target date we set for ourselves — a time when we acknowledged that cultural change does not happen spontaneously but requires awareness and responsibility. It is to this awareness and responsibility that we now appeal… For this male-dominated world is a frightening place, and this festival, which views the realities of that world through an almost exclusively male lens, is, in its own way, frightening too.”