Venice's One Woman Director and the Funding Fight Behind It

Only one of the 20 films in this year's Venice competition was directed by a woman — and Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat told the Tokyo International Film Festival exactly where to look for the reason. "The discrimination did not start at the festival, but it started at the development level," said Sadat, who sat on this year's Venice competition jury. "Filmmaking in Afghanistan is a crime – it's not as extreme as that – but the discrimination is fundamental, it's in the system."

Sadat spoke at a Tokyo Talk session at the TIFF Lounge in Tokyo Midtown Hibiya, alongside Serbian director Jelena Maksimović, whose "Until the Day Ends" played in Venice's Orizzonti section. Film scholar Takasaki Ikuko moderated. Sadat's latest feature, "No Good Men," opened the 76th Berlinale before screening in Tokyo. The session followed the festival's Women's Empowerment section and an animation symposium earlier the same day on four women directing in the anime industry.

What does the funding gap actually look like?

The panel was billed as a discussion of how women and feminism are presented in the two directors' films. It turned instead to money. Both filmmakers said securing the means to make a film demands conformity.

Maksimović described the political mechanics in Serbia. FilmCenter Serbia "worked decently" for a few years, she said, until the outgoing government cut its funding entirely in retaliation for filmmakers' support of the student anti-corruption protests. That movement grew out of protests over the deadly 2024 collapse of a train station canopy in Novi Sad and won Serbia's snap parliamentary election on Oct. 25, after Aleksandar Vučić resigned as president in September.

"Luckily, a few days ago the students won. We're very happy at the moment, but there's a huge fight in front of us," Maksimović said. "Even when the film center worked normally we had a difficult time financing our films, the amount of money for Serbian films is very small and it's hard to find co-production countries." She added that male filmmakers in Serbia enjoyed a privilege women did not — though she stopped short of calling this the definitive reason so few Serbian films screen in Japan.

She also described self-censorship at the application stage: "We didn't dare to apply to the big funding to get more money for our films because we knew we wouldn't get the money there." Solidarity among makers of less mainstream films exists, she said, but it forms "a certain kind of bubble" separate from "big funding."

What did Sadat say about Afghanistan and Europe?

Sadat, now based in Germany, described a closed network at home. "There is this cultural mafia, a bunch of old men, and you as a woman, you never can get in," she said. Entry demands "capitulation, submission and compromise." Her alternative: "get connected to another system. In my case, it was European filmmaking." That system, she cautioned, still treats the gender gap in funding as normal — a lack of development support she tied directly to the thin showing of women in Venice's lineup. The lone exception, May el-Toukhy's "Woman Unknown," went on to win the Golden Lion.

Sadat said Venice director Alberto Barbera, when pressed by the press, answered that "the quality of the films that female directors make are not good enough for competition." Barbera told Variety in July the sole film by a woman was "the only one we found of adequate quality to compete internationally." Sadat's rebuttal was blunt: "There were films that were just bad, but they are made by male directors. But women directors are not allowed to make bad [films]." Women, she argued, are held to a standard where anything less than perfection is punished, while men get room to experiment.

An audience member noted "only about four films in the selection made by women" at Tokyo itself and asked how to achieve material change rather than lip service. Maksimović's answer targeted infrastructure: "We have to change the systems – start with the fundings, the committees." She rejected tokenism: "I know people are trying to change things, but are they really changing? Or are they just putting things into boxes?"

Sadat, asked about the future, kept expectations modest: "Coming from a war country, and in our country, people are absolutely in survival mode. We do not think of the future; we think about the present. Change can start from little things." With Serbia's students now in power and Venice's Golden Lion won by a woman, the test is whether the funding committees move before the next festival cycle repeats the numbers.