Venice Blinked: One Woman Made the Cut
May El-Toukhy, who is genuinely excellent and deserves every frame of attention she gets, is standing in a field that should hold a dozen.
There is a version of this conversation where we pretend the Venice Film Festival's competition lineup is an accident — where the numbers land the way they do because the films weren't there, the submissions didn't come, the quality wasn't equal. That version is comfortable. It is also completely dishonest.
The 2026 Venice main competition has one female director. One. May El-Toukhy, who is genuinely excellent and deserves every frame of attention she gets, is standing in a field that should hold a dozen. Instead she holds it alone, which is a different thing entirely — and the festival knows it, even if the press release doesn't say so. This is the steepest decline in female representation in five years. Five years of stated commitment, of panels and pledges and carefully worded programming notes. One woman in competition is not a shortlist. It is an answer.
Meanwhile, the Horizons section opens with Alina Marazzi's *The Girl With the Leica*, which Fandango Sales has just boarded for international distribution — a quiet, genuinely interesting signal that the work is being made and is finding its way. The architecture of the festival just isn't wide enough to hold it.
Elsewhere in the week's screen conversation: Benicio Del Toro, still riding the long tail of his *One Battle After Another* moment — the one that turned into a meme before the film even cooled — is pivoting to comedy. *Protective Custody*, from Mike Judge and with Ben Stiller producing, lands on Apple TV+, which is a pairing strange enough to be interesting. Judge understands absurdity with a straight face. Del Toro understands weight. Something good might come out of the collision.
And Sacha Baron Cohen is bringing Ali G back — *Ali G: Who Iz I?* at Amazon MGM Studios, theatrical this autumn. The character who made career-ending interviews look like accidents is returning to a world where every politician already performs for the camera. The satirical gap has narrowed. Whether Cohen can find new air in it is the only question worth asking.
The devastating verdict, though, belongs to Venice. A festival that positions itself as cinema's highest court just seated a jury of one where it counts most. The girl with the Leica is in Horizons. The woman who should be in competition is somewhere in the films they didn't select. That's not curation. That's a pattern.
