This year, there are six female directors in Rome. It is not quite a revolution yet, don’t worry: male cinema can continue to sleep relatively soundly. But out of eighteen films in the Progressive Cinema competition, six are directed by women. And already, following the recent debate in Venice over the presence of women at major festivals, this constitutes a small statistical anomaly interesting enough to deserve a closer look.
The 21st Rome Film Fest, directed by Paola Malanga, will take place from October 13 to 25 and presents a programme that, beyond the competition, significantly expands the presence of women in the other sections as well. In Progressive Cinema, meanwhile, alongside the three Italian films Brianza, Giorni felici and Mustang, we find Blerta Basholli’s Dua, Frauke Finsterwalder’s Eurotrash, Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, and other films directed by women.
The interesting thing, however, is not counting.
Because turning every festival into a tally of men and women risks producing yet another form of reduction: the female director as an administrative category. Six women, good. Seven, better. Eight, applause. At nine, we can finally declare the problem of patriarchy solved and move on to the buffet.
The problem is another one.
At Venice, during the jury’s press conference, Maggie Gyllenhaal had put her finger precisely on that point. Faced with the very limited presence of female directors in the competition, she spoke of a systemic problem and, above all, questioned something far more difficult to measure than percentages: the criteria through which we decide what constitutes important cinema, “high” cinema, cinema worthy of entering the competition at major festivals.
The question, after all, is simple and sufficiently impertinent: who decides what has value?
It was also a question running through Madri e donne da Venezia 83. L’altra metà dello sguardo, where I tried to look at a series of films through an apparently banal yet rather uncomfortable issue: women can be portrayed perfectly well by men, but the place from which they are viewed remains different. As long as a woman is merely what cinema observes, interprets, desires, judges or puts into crisis, the gaze continues to have a privileged direction. When, instead, a woman constructs that gaze herself, something in the mechanism inevitably changes.
This does not mean that there is some mysterious universal female gaze. That would be the mirror-image absurdity of the one that, for centuries, has made the male perspective the implicit measure of the universal.
It means, rather, that different experiences can produce different questions.
And this is precisely why it is interesting to look, at least on paper, at what is arriving in Rome.
In Dua, Blerta Basholli tells the story of a thirteen-year-old Kosovar girl as war approaches. Frauke Finsterwalder’s Eurotrash centres on a journey and a mother-son relationship. Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Giorni felici, based on Zuzu’s graphic novel, explores a romantic relationship through a female protagonist. Mustang, directed by Kasia Smutniak, is instead a documentary that returns to the story of a school project in Mustang begun in 2003 with Pietro Taricone.
These are not, obviously, “films about women”. And fortunately so.
They are films that move through adolescence, war, family, memory, the body, relationships, identity, work and desire. Themes that belong to women no more than they belong to men. But they can be approached through a different experience and therefore through a different construction of the gaze.
This is precisely where things become interesting.
Because the point is not to establish whether a film directed by a woman is automatically better than one directed by a man. It isn’t. That would simply be patriarchy with a minus sign in front of it.
The point is to ask whether we are really sure that the criteria through which we recognise quality are neutral, as we often like to tell ourselves.
It was a question I also encountered while writing about Un détour par Diane, where irony becomes a tool for dismantling the grammar of the masculine: not through a manifesto, but by disrupting the small rules that seem natural — who pays, who desires, who conquers, who decides, who interprets the other’s desire.
Perhaps this is what is worth observing in Rome.
Not how many women there are.
But what happens when they are the ones deciding where to look from.
Paola Malanga obviously does not need to be turned into some high priestess of the female gaze, and it would be rather ridiculous to automatically attribute every consequence of the programme to her artistic direction. But the programme is there, and it is difficult not to notice that the presence of female directors is not confined to a symbolic box.
The competition has six out of eighteen. The rest of the Festival adds more. And Alice nella città, in turn, presents a significant presence of female directors.
Now we will have to see the films.
Because this is where statistics end and cinema begins.
And then we will be able to discover whether what today appears to be a simple numerical difference is also a difference in perspective. Whether forms, themes, bodies, conflicts and perspectives will emerge that cinema has looked at less often or looked at differently. Or whether, once the camera starts rolling, the distinction between men and women will become far less interesting than the distinction between good films and bad films.
Although, by then, Gyllenhaal’s question would still remain.
Who decided what is beautiful? And above all, does a completely neutral notion of “quality” really exist, separate from the perspectives, experiences and cultural categories through which we look at a film?