Maggie Gyllenhaal Isn’t Thrilled With How Few Female Directors Are at Venice This Year

Are film-festival press conferences the place to quiz celebrities about politics? The question has torn the festival ecosystem apart this year. One side sees it as a distraction from the art, creating an unfair expectation that stars eloquently speak off the cuff about anything that’s happening in the news and contributing to a sense of politics as performance. The other side counters that politics cannot be so easily extricated from movies or, indeed, from life. We live in contentious political times, and given a rare moment of access to stars, it’s only natural to ask them what they think. (And from a business perspective, a journalist can more easily sell — and audiences would rather read — a story about an actor’s politics than one about a film few readers have heard of.) 

Whatever the right approach is, this year has made clear the wrong approach. Seeking to put the focus back on cinema, the Berlin International Film Festival in February attempted to discourage any discussion of politics in press conferences, a decision that made everybody mad, led to a lot of awkward quotes from celebrities, and eventually created an even bigger distraction than simply allowing reporters to ask their annoying questions would have.

Such was the backdrop against which the Venice Film Festival originally revealed it was scrapping its traditional opening press conference with the competition jury. Official word said there was a “scheduling conflict,” though given the precedent Berlin set, it was fair to wonder whether the festival was subtly trying to steer away from political questions. (Venice leadership strenuously denied this.) After a few days of backlash, the festival changed course: The press conference was back on. And so it was on Wednesday afternoon that jury head Maggie Gyllenhaal and Venice chief Alberto Barbera showed up in front of a room full of international press to answer the best politically themed questions they could muster. (There were other people onstage, too, but almost every question was aimed at Gyllenhaal and Barbera. The rest of the jury had to sit in the audience, creating an unsettling moment when I wasn’t sure if the bald man I was looking at was Brutalist composer Daniel Blumberg or merely a cinephile who looked a lot like Daniel Blumberg.)

To kick things off, one reporter asked Gyllenhaal a classic press-conference multipart question: Given the bevy of films at Venice about the genocide in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and income inequality, did she think “cinema should be political,” and also, did she have any thoughts regarding “the state of the industry at a time when studios, directors, and actors increasingly seem to be distancing themselves from political commentary and controversy?” 

At all this, Gyllenhaal had to laugh. “Might as well get into it,” she said. Promising she’d speak more at the opening ceremony, she gave a brief overview of her thoughts. “We could say, ‘How are we possibly talking about movies right now when the world is in a state of emergency?’ To me, the answer has something to do with empathy. Film allows an opening into an opportunity to find empathy inside ourselves,” she said. Through cinema, we “challenge ourselves to hear stories about the most corrupt, the most perverse people because it opens up the opportunity to find empathy for those people and even look at the ways in which we might have a little bad guy inside us. I think that if movies are an honest look into other people’s experiences, then they are fundamentally, unavoidably political — as well as a lot of other things.”

Test duly passed, the rest of the press conference was spent on political questions both lofty (what did everyone think about the future of cinema in the world of smartphones and vertical video?) and specific (as a female filmmaker herself, what did Gyllenhaal think about there being only two films directed by women, May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s Naza, in competition?).

After joking that the world had finally realized women were simply worse at directing than men, Gyllenhaal gave a serious answer. “There’s a systemic problem: It’s much harder for women to get their films financed. Also, could it be possible that the things that women, having had a different experience of being alive in the world, want to make movies about are not always deemed ‘high art’? Who decides what’s good? Who decides what’s valuable?” Turning to address Barbera next to her, she added pointedly: “That’s also a question I have. And it’s a legitimate one.” 

As the male gatekeeper in charge of that system, it was now Barbera’s turn under the microscope: Did he agree that female filmmakers were devalued, and if so, did the problem need to be addressed in a systemic way? Unfortunately, Barbera delivered his answer entirely in Italian and I had neglected to pick up a translation headset, so his remarks were lost to time. (He previously defended his selection by noting that only 24 percent of submissions were directed by women, down from 30 percent the year prior.) However, Gyllenhaal popped in to let the chief off the hook a bit. “It’s been such a short time that women have had the opportunity to make films at all. And it will take some time to get used to the fact that many women make movies quite differently than men do.” And, she said, her very presence at the head of the jury could be read as a sign of support for female filmmakers. “I think Alberto and Julia asking me to be the head of the main jury competition after the two films in particular that I have made is a very important thing to consider too.”

After Barbera and Gyllenhaal departed, their spot at the podium was filled by George Clooney, this year’s recipient of the honorary Golden Lion. Given the occasion, this was more of a softball game than a serious grilling: Clooney happily answered questions about how much he loved Venice (a lot), his favorite memory of Venice (getting married here), and whether he checked out the Biennale when he was in town (always). But he handled the expected political questions with aplomb, giving thoughtful and uncontroversial answers about climate change, the emerging media oligarchy (“the five or six biggest outlets for information are owned by the richest people in the world”), and the dangers of AI. The session closed with a question about how, as an American living in Europe, he felt about the political situation back home. 

“I’m very optimistic about things,” he said. “We’re at a moment in time that is unfortunate; I think that’s an understatement. I do believe that we’re going to get through all of it. I’m old enough to remember 1968, when every city in the United States was set on fire and we lost Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in the same year,” he said. “We’ve had some other difficult times, but this is one of them. There’s a great word, kakistocracy, which is a country run by the least-qualified people. I think maybe we have a kakistocracy right now. But we’ll get through it. We’ll have an election in November that should be a check and balance, and in 2028, with any luck, we’ll have some restoration into some normalcy … We will get through it, and we will come out of it better.” Was this especially trenchant political commentary? Not exactly. But it was delivered with the charisma and conviction of a natural-born movie star. And ultimately, that’s why reporters ask these questions in the first place. Call it performative all you want — isn’t the point of a place like Venice to see great performances?