Venice Film Festival jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal used her opening press conference on Wednesday to question why only one of the 20 films in this year’s main competition comes from a woman director, calling the imbalance a systemic problem rooted in financing and in who decides what counts as serious cinema.
Asked to weigh in during the jury photocall, Gyllenhaal opened with a wry aside — joking that critics might conclude men simply make better films than women — before turning serious. She argued that women have had comparatively little time to build careers as directors and that many tell stories in ways the industry still struggles to value. She wondered aloud whether subjects women choose to explore, shaped by their own lived experience, get dismissed as lesser art.
The remark lands after months of mounting criticism over this year’s lineup. May El-Toukhy’s “Woman Unknown” stands as the lone female-directed title competing for the Golden Lion, a sharp decline from six such films last year. Italian advocacy groups, including Women in Film Television and Media Italia, published an open letter denouncing the selection as effectively all-male and rejecting the idea that quality operates independent of who gets invited to compete.
Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera, seated beside Gyllenhaal, has repeatedly defended the roster, attributing the gap to submission numbers rather than bias. He has noted that roughly a quarter of this year’s fiction submissions came from women, down from around 30 percent the previous year, and pointed to Venice’s recent record of honoring female filmmakers with its top prizes, including Golden Lions for Chloé Zhao and Audrey Diwan.
Gyllenhaal, who directed “The Lost Daughter” and premiered it at Venice in 2021 before winning the festival’s screenplay prize, said she lacked female directors to look up to earlier in her career and had always sensed she belonged behind the camera despite that absence. She called her appointment to lead this year’s jury, following two films she has directed, a meaningful signal in itself, even as she pressed the festival to account for the numbers behind its own selection.
