For most of its 82 years, Venice has been perceived as the world’s most glamorous film festival. This year was no exception: stars like Julia Roberts, Cate Blanchett, Jude Law, and George Clooney dutifully waved from canals and walked red carpets (although Law tripped over a water taxi and Clooney got sick).
But the films themselves struck a different note. Jury president Alexander Payne may have reflected on current affairs during his opening press conference, declaring himself concerned only with discussing cinema, but cinema in Venice this year was largely concerned with discussing current events.
The festival’s big hits were both heartbreaking stories—directed by women—that addressed real-world situations of such tragedy and magnitude that many people shy away from discussing them, much less making a film about them.
At the end of the festival, Rajab’s voice, a dramatization of the Israel Defense Forces’ murder of a five-year-old girl in Gaza by Kaouther Ben Hania, received a 23-minute standing ovation, in addition to chants around the auditorium of “Free Palestine.”
The film uses actual audio from Rajab’s phone call with emergency call handlers, where she pleads to be rescued from the car she was trapped in after Israeli tank fire killed the family members around her. During the January 2024 incident, the ambulance sent to reach Rajab was also attacked, killing the two paramedics on board. Rajab’s body, along with those of his relatives and paramedics, was found 12 days later.
Speaking in Venice, Ben Hania said: “I just felt I had to do something, so I wasn’t complicit. I have no political power. I’m not an activist. All I have is this tool that I’ve mastered a little bit – cinema. At least with this film, I wasn’t silenced.”
Meanwhile, Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years, A House of Dynamite, repeatedly took audiences through the 18-minute period from the launch of a nuclear strike on the U.S. to its landing, from the perspective of, variously, a soldier, a military leader, and the president (played by Idris Elba). Bigelow said she made the film in a desperate attempt to spark talks on a nuclear treaty.
“The film is an invitation to decide what to do with all these weapons,” she said. “How is annihilating the world a good defensive measure?”
Elsewhere, evidence is mounting that cinema is increasingly acting as an almost urgent response unit to help audiences interpret a chaotic world. The latest, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, stars Emma Stone as a high-powered executive kidnapped by conspiracy theorists convinced it’s an alien intent on destroying Earth. Confirming the film as an inertial allegory about combating climate catastrophe, its director said: “Humanity is facing a reckoning very soon. People need to choose the right path, otherwise I don’t know how much time we have left.”
Meanwhile, No Other Choice, the latest from Oldboy’s Park Chan-Wook, was a satire about a long-time factory worker who feels forced to eliminate all competitors for a future position. “We all harbor this deep fear of job insecurity,” Park said. “Whoever is out there trying to make a living in today’s modern capitalist society.”
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein engaged with the ethics of AI, though he claimed otherwise , and Law was in town playing Vladimir Putin in Olivier Asayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin. While Law sought to downplay the film’s contemporary relevance, its director was less coy, declaring, “The film is very much about how modern politics, the politics of the 21st century, was invented, and some of that evil was borne out of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in Russia.”
This eagerness among filmmakers for direct political engagement seems unlikely. Announcing its formation on Friday, the director of the San Sebastián Film Festival also issued a lengthy statement calling for an end to “the genocide… the unimaginable massacres to which Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is subjecting the Palestinian people.”
Meanwhile, in London on Wednesday night, Hugh Bonneville took an ITV reporter by surprise when he began his red carpet remarks by saying, “What is about to happen in Gaza City is indefensible. The international community must do more to stop it.” He then continued, “Downton Abbey is a lovely film.”
