The Venice Film Festival has suffered its steepest decline in female representation in five years, with just one woman director selected for this edition’s main competition. It marks a dramatic fall from the six female filmmakers in last year’s edition, which saw Kaouther Ben Hania win the grand jury prize for “The Voice of Hind Rajab” and Valérie Donzelli earn best screenplay for “At Work.”
Danish-Egyptian director May El-Toukhy’s drama “Woman Unknown” is the sole female-directed film among the 20 titles competing for the Golden Lion at Venice this year, the lineup for which is curated by longtime chief Alberto Barbera.
In recent editions, the official competition had maintained a relatively steady level of female representation. Last year, six of the festival’s 21 competition films were directed by women, including works by Mona Fastvold, Kathryn Bigelow, Enyedi Ildikó, Shu Qi, Donzelli and Ben Hania — making up 29% of the slate.
In stark contrast with the competition, the Horizons section — also curated by Barbera and built around emerging voices and cutting edge works — will break its own record with eight out of 19 films directed by women, repping roughly 42% of the section. Out of these, at least two — Alina Marazzi with “La Ragazza Con La Leica” and Rubaiyat Hossain with “The Difficult Bride” — were understood to have been considered for a competition upgrade at some point. Anuparna Roy, who won the section’s best first film and director prizes last year with “Songs of the Forgotten Trees,” is also back with her sophomore outing, “Lovers in the Blue Night.”
