Female directors should fight film-industry sexism by making movies that appeal to as wide an audience as possible, Venice Film Festival jury president Annette Bening said Wednesday, the first day of a festival that has been criticized for a lack of female voices.
"American Beauty" star Bening, a four-time Academy Awards nominee, heads the panel that will choose a winner of the Golden Lion from among 21 films competing for the festival's top prize. Only one is by a woman: Vivian Qu's "Angels Wear White."
Bening said "it's a long road" to equality but things are changing for the better.
She told reporters at the festival that "we as women have to be very sharp and shrewd and creative ourselves about what we chose to make."
She said all directors struggle to get films made and "there is a lot of sexism of course."
"I think the more that we as women can make films that speak to everyone, we can be regarded as filmmakers," Bening added.
Festival director Alberto Barbera has defended the festival's selections this year, saying the industry remains "very sexist" and there simply are not enough female directors.
Barbera told The Associated Press that he didn't like the idea of setting a quota for female-directed films "because it doesn't help them and it doesn't help the films."
There are several female directors in the Venice lineup outside the main competition.
Horizons, the festival's edgier sidebar competition, opened Wednesday with "Nico, 1988," a biopic of the former Velvet Underground singer by Italian director Susanna Nicchiarelli.
Supreme Court declines to hear appeal from singer R. Kelly, convicted of child sex crimes
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal Monday from the singer R. Kelly, who is now serving 20 years in prison after being convicted of child sex convictions in Chicago.
The Grammy Award-winning R&B singer, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, was found guilty in 2022 of three charges of producing child sexual abuse images and three charges of enticement of minors for sex.
His lawyers argued that a shorter statute of limitations on child sex crime prosecutions should have applied to offenses dating back to the 1990s. Current law permits charges while an accuser is still alive.
The justices did not detail their reasoning in declining to hear the case, as is typical. And none publicly dissented. Lower courts previously rejected his arguments.
Federal prosecutors have said the video showed Kelly abusing a girl. The accuser identified only as Jane testified that she was 14 when the video was taken.
Kelly has also appealed a separate 30-year sentence for federal racketeering and sex trafficking convictions in New York.
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