Venice chief Barbera on Hollywood, AI, and gender parity

Alberto Barbera, the Venice Film Festival’s longtime artistic director, is not known for diplomatic evasiveness — and his recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that reputation. Speaking ahead of the 2025 edition of the world’s oldest film festival, Barbera offered an unusually candid account of three forces reshaping the prestige-cinema circuit: a measurable retreat by major US studios from the Lido, artificial intelligence’s quiet insertion into the production pipeline, and a troubling reversal of the gender-parity momentum that festivals spent the better part of a decade building.

These are not abstract institutional worries. They describe a structural shift in how films get made, financed, and positioned for awards season — and Venice, which in recent years launched Oscar campaigns for films including Nomadland, The Shape of Water, and Joker, sits at the nerve center of that system. What Barbera says about the festival circuit matters because the festival circuit, to a degree the general public rarely appreciates, determines which films get seen and which do not.

Hollywood’s slow retreat from the Lido

Barbera told The Hollywood Reporter that the number of US studio films submitted to Venice has declined — not catastrophically, but steadily and in a direction that concerns him. The reasons, as he described them, are layered. Streaming platforms, which briefly treated Venice as a prestige launchpad during the mid-2010s boom, have pulled back their original-film budgets. The traditional studios, meanwhile, are increasingly protective of their awards contenders, preferring domestic showcases or the Toronto International Film Festival’s more commercially oriented marketplace to the European critical environment Venice provides.

This is a meaningful distinction. Toronto, held each September within days of Venice’s closing ceremony, is structured as a buyer’s market — a place where distribution deals close and audience awards generate the kind of populist heat that sustains long Oscar campaigns. Venice operates on a different logic: it awards artistic merit through a jury and confers critical legitimacy that can cut both ways. A lukewarm reception on the Lido can damage a film before it reaches American audiences. Studios with a great deal riding on an awards contender increasingly see that risk as unnecessary.

Barbera did not name specific studios that had passed on Venice in recent years, and The Hollywood Reporter’s account noted that he was measured in attributing motives. What he made clear was that the retreat is real and that it shifts Venice’s programming toward European and international cinema — which may strengthen the festival’s identity as a global showcase while narrowing its influence over the American awards calendar.

AI and the question the festival world hasn’t answered yet

On artificial intelligence, Barbera’s remarks were notably careful rather than dismissive. He acknowledged that AI-assisted tools are already present in post-production workflows — in visual-effects pipelines, in sound design, in some areas of editing — and that Venice, like every major festival, has not yet settled on a coherent policy for how to evaluate or disclose AI involvement in submitted films.

This is an honest admission of institutional lag. The Cannes Film Festival announced in May 2023 that it would not categorically ban AI-generated content but would require disclosure; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences updated its eligibility rules the same year but left significant interpretive room. Venice has not issued a comparably specific public framework, and Barbera’s comments suggest the festival is watching the conversation evolve rather than trying to lead it. He framed the issue primarily as a question of creative authorship — at what point does AI involvement dilute the human artistic vision that festivals exist to recognize? — but offered no threshold answer.

It’s unclear whether Venice plans to formalize an AI disclosure requirement before its 2025 edition, scheduled to open in late August. The festival did not respond to a request for comment beyond what Barbera shared with The Hollywood Reporter.

Gender parity: the numbers moving in the wrong direction

The most pointed section of Barbera’s remarks concerned gender representation in the competition lineup. After years of deliberate effort — and after the 5050×2020 pledge, signed by Venice alongside Cannes and other major festivals in 2018, committed signatories to gender-balanced juries and improved transparency around selection — the proportion of films directed by women in Venice’s main competition has declined from its recent high-water marks.

Barbera was direct about the cause: the pool of submissions does not reflect gender parity, and a festival that selects on artistic merit rather than quotas will inevitably reflect the inequities of the industry that feeds it. This is a defensible position, and it is also a convenient one. Critics of that framing, including advocates at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, have argued for years that “selecting the best” is never a neutral act — that what counts as best, who gets the resources to make films of competition caliber, and whose work gets submitted are all products of structural bias that passive selection perpetuates.

Barbera’s candor in naming the backslide is worth crediting. His explanation for it, which essentially locates the problem upstream in the industry rather than in the festival’s own selection logic, is where the conversation needs to continue. The data from USC Annenberg’s 2024 Inclusion Report found that women directed 16% of the top 100 grossing films of 2023 — a figure that has not meaningfully changed in a decade, which means the pipeline Barbera references is itself the problem.

What this means for prestige cinema going forward

Taken together, Barbera’s remarks sketch a festival circuit under quiet pressure from multiple directions at once. Hollywood’s partial disengagement makes Venice simultaneously freer and less central to the awards conversation that drives much of the English-language press coverage it receives. The AI question will force every major festival into a policy choice it has so far avoided. And the gender-parity backslide risks making the gains of the 2018-to-2022 period look like a temporary correction rather than a durable shift.

None of these are crises, exactly. Venice remains the oldest and, in certain critical circles, the most prestigious film festival in the world. The Lion awards carry weight. The 2024 edition, which ran from August 28 to September 7, drew international attention for its jury decisions and its competition slate. But Barbera’s interview reads like a diagnostic, offered by someone who has run the institution since 2012 and understands precisely where the pressure points are — even when the remedies are not fully in his hands.

The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s annual reports and The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of Barbera’s remarks provided the primary sourcing for this piece. The 5050×2020 pledge documentation is publicly available via the initiative’s website.

The next test for several of Barbera’s claims will arrive when Venice announces its 2025 official competition lineup, expected in late July — at which point the gender-balance numbers and the ratio of US studio titles to international submissions will be publicly countable.