Written by Anonymous
The Venice Film Festival has a women problem. In 2025, women directed five of the 21 films in Competition. In this year’s official Competition, there is just one: May el-Toukhy.
It would be easy to frame this as a failure of festival selection. But that diagnosis comes too late. A festival can only choose from films that have survived development, casting, financing and production. The more urgent question is not simply why so few films by women are selected. It is why so few are allowed to reach the point where selection is possible.
This is not only a pipeline problem. It is a power problem.
In today’s independent film economy, a bankable actor is not simply a performer. Their name can unlock international sales, distribution commitments and millions in production finance. That gives a small group of stars and their representatives extraordinary influence over which films exist at all.
They are the industry’s unofficial kingmakers.
The industry is moving backwards
The latest Celluloid Ceiling report found that women accounted for only 23% of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers on the 250 highest-grossing films of 2025. Women directed just 13% of those films. Seventy-five per cent employed ten or more men in pivotal behind-the-scenes roles; only 7% employed ten or more women.
The long view is even more sobering. According to the study’s 28-year Living Archive, women’s share of directing jobs on the top 250 films rose from 9% in 1998 to only 13% in 2025. Women editors were no better represented in 2025 than they had been in 1998.
The problem is not simply getting a first feature made. It is sustaining a career. An analysis of 70 years of filmmaking data found that only 28.8% of women directors made more than one feature, compared with 39% of men. Investors ask for track records, while women are denied the repeat opportunities required to build them.
The economic excuse does not withstand scrutiny. Research summarized by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that when films by women and men had comparable budgets, their box-office grosses were comparable too. USC Annenberg research similarly found that a director’s gender plays little role in box-office success; production budget, breadth of distribution and the strength of the story matter far more.
A new study of French cinema adds a telling complication. Women directors can receive stronger career returns from box-office success, yet the gender gap in their chances of remaining in the industry widens over longer careers. Women are not failing commercially. The system is failing to convert their success into durable access.
The meeting before the movie
I am a woman film director. Here is my hypothesis: too few films by women make it far enough down the pipeline to be considered by festivals, distributors or awards bodies because access is rationed much earlier, often through something as apparently minor as a meeting.
We do not have a festival problem, we have a pipeline problem.
I am the creative force behind an upcoming mid-budget period film. It has a strong script, A-list female talent attached and a track record behind it that includes a BAFTA nomination and high-end television. Yet securing full financing has been nothing short of an uphill battle.
It is immensely frustrating. Most of the male actors whose involvement could move the film towards a greenlight would not even meet me about the project. Not for a fifteen-minute Zoom. Whether the refusal comes from them or their agents, I cannot know. But all I am asking is that they seriously consider working with a creator from a different background.
This is not an argument that any actor must accept any role. It is an argument that refusing even to encounter the work helps preserve a closed circuit of familiarity. The same directors, producers and agents remain legible to the same stars, whose names then unlock the same kinds of films.
By the time a festival announces a male-dominated competition, the decisive choices may have been made years earlier, privately and invisibly: whose script was read, whose call was returned, whose meeting was accepted, whose female-led story was judged sufficiently important for a male star to play a supporting role.
That is the perspective missing from much of the debate. We count women when a festival program is published or when Academy nominations are announced. We rarely count the meetings that never happened. Who are the gatekeepers? And who are the true kingmakers?
Who gets to be secondary?
There is another uncomfortable question. Are male stars less willing to play secondary roles in films centred on women?
Women directors often make, or are encouraged to make, stories about women. Yet many independent films still require a financeable male name to unlock the budget. If established men will only participate when the narrative revolves around them, the market quietly dictates whose interior life is permitted to occupy the centre of the screen.
The result is a structural paradox. The industry asks for female-led stories while financing practices may require those stories to secure validation from a bankable man. When that man will not read, meet or accept a supporting part, the project stalls. It then disappears from the data before a festival, critic or audience ever has the chance to judge it.
Films cannot be nominated if they are never financed. They cannot win awards if they never enter production. The Academy’s own database records who reached the final stage, but it cannot show us the potentially award-worthy work lost upstream.
Some men are already allies. My own recent feature was made partly because certain male actors did take the meeting. Their willingness did not diminish their status. It helped a film exist.
That experience also showed me how much unused power remains in the system. A short call can expose material to the person whose attachment changes the risk calculation for financiers. An introduction can make a project visible. Agreeing to play a supporting role can help place a woman’s story at the center without making the man smaller.
So here is a practical proposal for the men whose names carry financial weight, and for the agents who manage access to them:
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Take more meetings with women and underrepresented directors outside your established network.
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Read projects in which the central character is not you. Or males.
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Consider the supporting role when your participation could unlock the film.
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Ask who directed the creator’s previous work before asking why she has not made more of it.
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Use your cultural capital to open a door, not merely to walk through one.
This is not charity. It is not a lowering of standards. The evidence shows that women’s films are commercially viable when they receive comparable resources. It is an intervention in a market whose assumptions continue to reproduce the same unequal outcomes.
Cinema shapes how we understand ourselves and each other. When whole groups of filmmakers cannot reach the resources needed to tell their stories, audiences lose films they never even knew were missing.
Asked about the shortage of women directors at Venice, jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal joked, “It’s finally become clear that men make better movies than women do.” The punchline arrived ten days later: May el-Toukhy, the only woman to direct a Competition film on her own, won the Golden Lion for Woman Unknown. The problem was never whether a woman’s film could win. It was how few made it into the race.
The next cultural touchstone may already exist as a script on someone’s desk. But before it can reach Venice, the box office or the Oscars, somebody with power has to take it seriously.
Sometimes the first act of allyship is only fifteen minutes long.
Take the meeting.
Because sometimes being a kingmaker is more powerful than being king.
