Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera has sparked criticism from several Italian film organizations — including Women in Film Television and Media Italia — for this year’s sharp drop in female directors, with only one woman-helmed film in the 20-title competition.
Regarding the Italian selection, they pointed out that: “Seven male directors represent Italian cinema in competition and out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, on the festival’s main stage. It is a one-dimensional selection: entirely male.”
More broadly, “Quality is not a divine, neutral, objective category suspended above history,” the orgs said in an impassioned appeal published on Monday in Italian newspaper La Repubblica and posted on social media. “We know full well that it is a concept that moves and evolves, and that art is a battlefield made of bodies, tears, blood and power. It is not a pure heavenly sphere where the angels of quality flutter asexually.”
The statement continued: “Each selection is the result of a gaze, a culture, an imagination. Preferences, sensitivities, limitations, mistakes and a precise editorial line. To think that quality can be separated from all this is to ignore how the cultural canon is constructed and where art originates,” it added.
