The Venice Film Festival used to be the place where the awards season put on its best tuxedo. This year, it looks more like a war room, with politics and political cinema set to dominate the red carpet.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival kicks off on September 2 with Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” a drama about Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 takeover of Britain’s The Sun tabloid — the origin story of the Murdoch right-wing media empire.
Over 11 days on the Lido, audiences will also get films about Israel and Gaza, Russia’s war on Ukraine, the CIA-backed coup in Pinochet’s Chile, ICE raids in Minneapolis and a tell-all documentary on the world’s richest man.
Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera has called it Venice’s “most political” edition ever.
Venice goes political
This year’s competition includes “Naza,” a documentary from “No Other Land” Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, examining Israeli military killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
US-Russian director Julia Loktev chronicles Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent journalism in “My Undesirable Friends Part II — Exile,” a sequel to her 2024 doc.
Andrei Kutsila’s “Letters From the Silenced Country” a DW, ZDF/Arte and TVP co-production about repression in Kutsila’s native Belarus, will have its world premiere in Venice.
As will Alex Gibney’s four-hour Elon Musk documentary “Musk,” a film the richest man in the world has already denounced, sight unseen, as a “hit piece.”
And Laura Poitras, the Oscar-winning director of “Citizenfour,” will screen what she describes as a “short horror film,” the documentary “They’re Here,” co-directed with Rachel Lauren Mueller and built from previously undisclosed footage of ICE’s deportation surge in Minneapolis last January.
This is a new look for Venice.
Under artistic director Barbera, the festival had until recently cultivated a reputation as a place for movie stars and Oscar campaigns. You go to Venice to watch Timothee Chalamet on the red carpet, or George Clooney and Brad Pitt yucking it up at a press conference.
Venice let the other big European festivals — Berlin, and to a lesser degree Cannes — be the homes of political movies and the polemical debates that accompany them.
Berlin’s political backlash
But Berlin’s reputation as a festival for activist cinema has taken a major hit. The past three years have seen political debate, primarily over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, overwhelm discussions of cinema at the Berlinale, to the point where the future of the festival looks in doubt.
At this year’s Berlinale, jury president Wim Wenders was lambasted online for saying filmmakers “have to stay out of politics.” Later, when Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah Al-Khatib called out the German government at the awards ceremony for being “partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel,” the backlash nearly cost Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle her job.
Venice, by contrast, has spent the past two years leaning into political cinema.
Venice leans into controversy
Last year saw the world premiere of Kaouther Ben Hania’s “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” The harrowing docudrama, which recreates the killing, by Israeli forces, of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl and her family in Gaza City, received a 22-minute standing ovation, a Lido record. The Israeli military has recently announced an official investigation into Hind Rajab’s death.
Just days before, thousands marched on the Lido in protest of the war in Gaza. Filmmakers called on Barbera to label Israel’s campaign “a genocide.” He didn’t go that far, speaking instead of his “huge sadness” over the suffering in Gaza and Palestine.
But the Venice boss didn’t flinch, then or now, from programming films that address, head-on, the most controversial topics of the day.
Ukraine objects to ‘DAU’
Russian films selected by the festival are also sparking protest.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, Culture Ministry and its embassy in Italy have issued a formal complaint over Barbera’s decision to include Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s “DAU,” an art house drama about life under Soviet rule in Ukraine, in official competition. Ukraine objects to the film’s Russian connections.
Khrzhanovsky is Russian-born, though he renounced his Russian citizenship and now lives in exile in Berlin. The film’s lead, Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, still lives and works in Russia and has never publicly condemned Russia’s war on Ukraine.
In a statement, the Ukrainian ministries said programming the film “sends a deeply worrying signal” given the war.
Barbera is not backing down. He called the criticism a “smear campaign” from people who haven’t seen the film.
Khrzhanovsky took to social media on August 20 with his rebuttal: “‘DAU’ is not an instrument of Russian state cultural policy,” he wrote on Facebook. “It is an artistic statement about the nature of totalitarian evil.”
Stars are still coming
Venice hasn’t completely abandoned its Hollywood stars.
Robert Pattinson, of “Batman” and “Twilight” fame, will hit the Lido this year with “Primetime,” playing a controversial US reality TV producer.
John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA agents in Chile on the eve of the Pinochet coup in “Wild Horse Nine” from director Martin McDonagh (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”).
Real-life couple Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz star as husband and wife in Florian Zeller’s “Bunker,” about an architect commissioned to build a nuclear shelter for a billionaire.
George Clooney and 93-year-old acting legend Ellen Burstyn will swing by to collect Golden Lion awards for lifetime achievement.
Venice also hasn’t abandoned its role as a gathering place for cinema’s elder statesmen — several of them German.
Wim Wenders, fresh off the Berlinale storm, brings an altogether gentler work to the Lido, a 3D documentary on the work of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.
Werner Herzog, the last wild man of ’70s German cinema, returns to narrative filmmaking for the first time in seven years in Venice with “Bucking Fastard,” starring real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara.
And for those who want to forget about the world for a moment and just kick back and sing, pop stars Liam and Noel Gallagher are expected on the Lido for the premiere of the Oasis reunion documentary “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”
