Maggie Gyllenhaal Made a Morbid Joke About the Venice Film Festival’s Almost All-Male Lineup
by Chrissy Stockton · Thought CatalogUpdated 5 minutes ago, September 2, 2026
Only one film in this year’s competition for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival was solely directed by a woman. That movie is the drama ‘Woman Unknown’ by Danish-Egyptian director May El-Toukhy.
19 other films in the competition were directed by men.
One, investigative documentary NAZA, was directed by a man and a woman, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is president of the main competition jury. She delivered a brutal joke when pressed on the gender gap at the festival: “I guess it’s finally become clear that men make better movies than women do.” She explained: “There’s a systemic problem. It’s harder for women to get films financed.”
While Hollywood is perceived of as a liberal, it’s actually far behind other industires in terms of gender equality — and it’s gotten worse, not better, over time.
Some of the earliest film directors were women. A historical study of Hollywood directing going back to 1893 found that women’s participation actually reached 22% by the early 1990s, before falling again as the decades wore on. Now, that number looks almost unreachable: according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, women directed just 8.1% of the top 100 grossing films in 2025.
Gyllenhaal pushed the point further, asking who gets to decide what counts as high art and what’s valuable. “Could it be possible that women, having had a different experience of being alive in the world, want to make movies about are not always deemed high art?” she said.
The exchange came at a festival being called its most political in years with the lineup touching war, Palestine, immigration and climate change. Asked earlier whether cinema should be political, Gyllenhaal called films “fundamentally, unavoidably political” and said their value lies in opening a path to empathy.
She’s leading a seven-member jury that includes Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To, Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat, French filmmaker Xavier Giannoli, British composer Daniel Blumberg and Italian film scholar Francesco Casetti.
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