SQLAlchemy many-to-many association querying specific child

In the case of many-to-many relationships, an association table can be used in the form of Association Object pattern.

I have the following setup of two classes having a M2M relationship through UserCouncil association table.

class Users(Base):
    name = Column(String, nullable=False)
    email = Column(String, nullable=False, unique=True)
    created_at = Column(DateTime, default=datetime.utcnow)
    password = Column(String, nullable=False)
    salt = Column(String, nullable=False)
    
    councils = relationship('UserCouncil', back_populates='user')


class Councils(Base):
    name = Column(String, nullable=False)
    created_at = Column(DateTime, default=datetime.utcnow)

    users = relationship('UserCouncil', back_populates='council')


class UserCouncil(Base):
    user_id = Column(UUIDType, ForeignKey(Users.id, ondelete='CASCADE'), primary_key=True)
    council_id = Column(UUIDType, ForeignKey(Councils.id, ondelete='CASCADE'), primary_key=True)

    role = Column(Integer, nullable=False)

    user = relationship('Users', back_populates='councils')
    council = relationship('Councils', back_populates='users')

However, in this situation, suppose I want to search for a council with a specific name cname for a given user user1. I can do the following:

for council in user1.councils:
    if council.name == cname:
        dosomething(council)

Or, alternatively, this:

session.query(UserCouncil) \
       .join(Councils)     \
       .filter((UserCouncil.user_id == user1.id) & (Councils.name == cname)) \
       .first()            \
       .council

While the second one is more similar to raw SQL queries and performs better, the first one is simpler. Is there any other, more idiomatic way of expressing this query which is better performing while also utilizing the relationship linkages instead of explicitly writing traditional joins?

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