Venice Counts Women: One Competing for the Top

By Dua Mifsud

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There is a moment in every film festival season where you stop scrolling through the competition lineup and feel something cold settle in your chest. Not outrage — outrage is loud and temporary. Something quieter. The kind of recognition that arrives when the numbers make an argument the press releases won't.

Venice 2026 has one woman competing for the Golden Lion. One. In the main competition. After years of pointed speeches about representation, after the numbers crept upward and the think pieces declared progress and everyone exhaled — this is what the lineup looks like. A single female director in the arena where careers are made and canons are written.

The easy response is to call it a bad year, a coincidence of submissions, a programming accident. The harder response is to notice that festivals have been having the same accident for decades and calling it that, and to wonder at what point an accident becomes a policy you simply haven't named yet.

What makes Venice specifically worth watching on this is the context. Cannes has been under sustained pressure. Berlin has moved. Venice has historically positioned itself as the festival that values provenance and reputation over politics — which is fine, until provenance and reputation turn out to be gendered in ways that compound quietly over generations. The selection committee doesn't discriminate, they'll tell you. They simply choose the best films. The best films, in 2026, are apparently directed by one woman.

Meanwhile at Sundance, Visar Morina's *Shame and Money* — a Kosovo family in economic and moral free fall — won the Grand Jury Prize and is heading to the Sarajevo Film Festival with the kind of momentum that reminds you why the smaller festivals often tell more honest stories about what audiences are actually ready for. Morina calls it "a look into the past and a warning to the future," which is the kind of line that sounds like a tagline but lands like a diagnosis when the film earns it.

And Netflix subscribers continue to wait patiently for *Toy Story 5* to migrate from theatrical to streaming, which is its own kind of cultural patience test — Pixar made a giant, everyone saw it in cinemas, and now the algorithm is deciding when you're allowed to feel that at home.

The devastating verdict isn't about Venice's numbers. It's about what happens the year after everyone agrees something needs to change — which is, apparently, nothing.