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Ides of March: The 2025 Venice Film Festival
The Voice of Hind Rajab On the evening of August 8, 1939, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels led a fleet of gondolas down the Canal Grande. He’d been invited to attend the opening of the seventh Venice Film Festival, which began in a lugubrious atmosphere. The specter of a new world conflict was haunting Europe; critics dispatching from the Lido wrote of an “empty” Venice, “long-faced people,” “little dancing” and “lots of play to chase away negative thoughts.” Back then, the festival functioned as a sort of political summit; the Biennale invited delegations from different countries, which would submit the films themselves. Sixteen nations took part in that edition, with the notable exception of the US, which boycotted the event after the jury awarded the Mussolini Cup to Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia the previous year. But Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks still graced the Lido, parties echoed from the Excelsior Hotel, a choir sang for Goebbels and 21 new features celebrated their world premiere in the newly built Palazzo del Cinema. “We have witnessed the triumph of sound, we are witnessing the triumph of color,” Biennale President Giuseppe Volpi said in his opening speech, before vowing that the festival would “concentrate and remain concentrated on art and only art.”
Such a head-in-the-sand approach has long since metastasized into Venice’s preferred response to the outside world. It’s telling that, in the weeks leading up to the 1939 edition, it wasn’t the war that worried the Biennale top-brass but what magazine Cine-Giornale called “The Jewish-Masonic Attempt to Organize a Film Festival Plagiarizing the One at Venice”—a few hundred miles west, Le Festival de Cannes kicked off that same year. Like its French counterpart, Venice has always existed in a bubble. That’s partly a question of geography: The festival doesn’t unfold on the bustling, tourist-infested main island but on the Lido, a thin sliver of land sandwiched between the lagoon and the Adriatic Sea. To attend is to experience a cognitive dissonance; each year, Venice must trick its guests into thinking there’s nothing more important than what happens in and around its theaters—but the world seems as dangerously close to apocalypse as it did in the late 1930s, and that illusion felt increasingly difficult to maintain.
As has often been the case under Artistic Director Alberto Barbera, the festival’s most conservative section—the official competition—was once again stuffed with timely films. Kathryn Bigelow rehashed Cold War-era paranoias in A House of Dynamite, in which a nuclear missile is set to wipe out the city of Chicago. Unless the weapon can be stopped, ten million people will die on contact; the White House staffers, government officials and soldiers Bigelow follows have less than 20 minutes to intercept the bomb and decide how to retaliate. But no sooner does the countdown end then time winds back and Bigelow chronicles the impending Armageddon from the perspective of a different set of characters. In a triptych replaying the scenario thrice to diminishing returns, Dynamite isn’t after a Rashomon-style disorientation—the various POVs do not contradict or significantly differ from each other, and the repetitive structure doesn’t expand the narrative. Dynamitewants us to feel utterly, desperately lost, but if it manages that that’s not a result of its fatalistic mood but of the dislocation triggered by the high-energy military patois and intricate acronyms (EKV, PEOC, STRATCOM…). Bigelow is far more concerned with verisimilitude than characterization; fleshing out these people isn’t as important as faithfully capturing their habitat and idiom.
Watching US President Idris Elba debate the best course of action with a gung-ho general, my mind wandered to Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964), starring Henry Fonda as a commander-in-chief wrestling with a very similar cataclysm. Released two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that film posited dialogue as our only chance to avert the apocalypse and gave its main actors time to debate their way out of doom; Dynamite is much too crowded and frenetic to afford Elba and co. the same privilege. These aren’t people but ciphers, with no inner lives beyond what fits the plot. The premise’s life-or-death urgency seems designed to make all contextual and background information irrelevant, but that doesn’t justify the script’s most glaring omission. Written by Noah Oppenheim, Dynamite doesn’t specify which country launched the missile heading into US soil, and if refusing to name the enemy will likely help the film’s commercial prospects, it’s also emblematic of its hollowness. It’s not just that Bigelow winds up saying very little about these characters and the catastrophe they’re ushering us into. It’s that she doesn’t seem interested in grappling with our doomsaying era so much as stoking it—Dynamite amounts to little more than an exercise in fearmongering.
Bigelow’s wasn’t the only Golden Lion contender speaking to nuclear anxieties. Jude Law played Vladimir Putin in Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, a chronicle of the “Tsar”’s rise to power as witnessed by the Rasputin-like media guru who curated his public persona, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano). A fictional riff on Vladislav Surkov—Putin’s real-life shadow counsellor—Baranov is an omniscient museum guide to the tacky purgatory of 1990s Russia and the Machiavellian figures who paved Putin’s ascent from former KGB spy to omnipotent autocrat. Assayas is no stranger to portraits of charismatic psychopaths. In Carlos (2010), he charted the life of Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez aka Carlos the Jackal; the recreation of the 1975 OPEC siege, when he stormed the organization’s headquarters in Vienna and took 42 oil ministers and bureaucrats hostage, ranks among the director’s finest sequences. Carlos was intended as a three-part miniseries, but its epic, maximalist scope suggested a saga in the David Lean vein; the same day the show premiered on French pay TV channel Canal+, a five-and-a-half-hour cut screened in Cannes. The Wizard of the Kremlin does the opposite: it’s a film that reduces a sensational chapter of Russia’s not-so-long-ago past to the stuff of a meandering, bloated TV-movie.
I haven’t read Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel, adapted by Assayas and co-scribe Emmanuel Carrère, so I can’t tell to what extent the source text is responsible for the many ponderous platitudes. Assayas treats Putin’s Russia as an unknowable Other, a country that’s almost ontologically different from the rest of the so-called civilized world. But the way his characters articulate those distinctions (“You in the West value power,” Baranov quips to a US scholar, “we value proximity to power”), or attempt to psychoanalyze Putin’s ascent (“We must kill the voice of the mother and embrace the father’s”), borders on the cartoonish. The Wizard kicks off in post-Berlin Wall Moscow and ends shortly after Putin is seen celebrating the opening of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a long and perilous journey dotted with diplomatic incidents, terrorist attacks, revolutions and wars. The episodic, one-event-after-another structure is a supercut of Russia’s recent history too diluted to sustain momentum. Fascinated with the gangster-tyrant at its center, The Wizard of the Kremlin never borders on hagiography but commits a different sin, deadening rich material into a dull, unimaginative ride.
Other titles registered as staid op-eds. In Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’s remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003), two deranged cousins identify the CEO of a chemical company (Emma Stone) as an alien from Andromeda and abduct her to negotiate her species’ retreat from Earth. This is Lanthimos’s fourth collaboration with Stone and DP Robbie Ryan, who trades the visual histrionics of earlier projects for less obtrusive camerawork; as the two freaks (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) start interrogating their hostage, Bugonia swells into a one-set theatre play. Lanthimos’s last Venice premiere was his Golden Lion-winning Poor Things (2023), a “liberal echo chamber movie” that kept wagging a finger at rape culture and toxic masculinity. Bugonia is another self-congratulatory state-of-the-nation manifesto, a dialogue between an upright member of society and two lunatic outcasts underscoring the impossibility of ever entering into discourse with someone whose worldview is shaped entirely by internet-fueled conspiracies. That’s an accurate snapshot of our post-truth zeitgeist, but that isn’t the same as genuinely reckoning with those anxieties. Hard as Plemons tries to add nuance to his character, I can’t shake the suspicion that Lanthimos eventually belittles the two kidnappers, and that Bugonia might be too self-satisfied to venture beyond its own bubble.
You could level the same complaint at Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, an attempt to grapple with the post-MeToo era that gradually morphs into a pedestrian intergenerational clash. After her favorite student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) is sexually assaulted by friend and Yale colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield), philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) must reconsider her allegiances: side with her pal or the young woman? The first feature written by actress-turned-screenwriter Nora Garrett navigates the minefield of our “shallow cultural climate” (Hank’s words) and so-called cancel culture. But if there’s anything truly distressing about After the Hunt, it’s not its hot-button issues but the clumsy way the film squanders them. Garrett imagines Alma and her peers as a generation almost antithetical to Maggie’s, which is all legitimate, but After the Hunt reduces members of the two warring sides—boomers/millennials vs Gen Z-ers—to spokespersons spitting trite talking points. Even Roberts’s downward spiral from tenured academic-hopeful to spiteful pariah loses its dramatic force. Alma might not know who to side with, but After the Hunt wastes no opportunity to remind us where weshould stand. Instead of articulating its thorniest ideas, the film chooses to lampoon those who hold them, cheapening the trauma that set it in motion.
One film meaningfully wrestling with our troubled times was Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. Based on a 1997 novel of the same name by Donald E. Westlake, it centers on Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun), a paper factory manager suddenly fired from the company he’s worked at for 25 years once it’s bought by an American firm. The top-brass have “no other choice” but to let him go, but as the family’s fortunes dwindle and the job hunt proves harder than expected, the man hatches a plan: he’ll eliminate the guy who holds the position he’s after at a rival paper mill and murder other potential candidates he sees as more qualified than himself. No Other Choice literalizes the idea of cut-throat competition to electrifying effects, seamlessly toggling between horror and comedy. Shocking as it might be, Man-soo’s killing spree is also deliriously clumsy, and the violence is offset by Park’s humorous flourishes, which often draw from Man-soo’s physical environment. Park’s films have a way of weaponizing their architecture; here, a job interview morphs into something closer to a police interrogation once a ray of sunshine bounces off a skyscraper onto Man-soo’s face.
No Other Choice left such a lasting impression because it radiated something sorely lacking from many other Golden Lion hopefuls: an eagerness to experiment with genre and form. Cobbling together different elements within the same frame has long been Park’s M.O., and in keeping with the rest of his oeuvre, his latest is a plastic, porous work. Not unlike Decision to Leave (2023), it builds on the director’s interest in modern-day technologies—littering Man-soo’s desperate pursuit with Instagram stories and video calls—and his keen eye for visuals that meld horror with ordinary life, none more effectively than a body bonsai-ed into a cube of flesh. Through frequent overlays and dissolves, Park’s strange, morbidly beautiful images do not cut but flow into each other, as if they were all part of the same unbroken nightmare. No Other Choice was the strongest entry in a depressingly underwhelming official competition. It’s an of-the-moment film combining astute social critique and bristling inventiveness, a mutability of form and mood cementing Park as one of the most elegant filmmakers working. A paper man in a digital world, Man-soo comes across as an untimely hero, and there’s something tragic about his staunch, anachronistic love for his craft (“Your lips are better than the highest quality tracing paper,” he whispers to his wife). By the end, the film’s title rings as a sad mantra; like the rivals he dispatches, Man-soo cannot imagine himself as existing outside his position in the pecking order.
I didn’t expect Park to leave the Lido empty-handed, much like I didn’t expect Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother to win the Golden Lion over Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. Venice likes to bestow its top prize on “topical” films: over the last five years, the statuette went to Nomadland (2020), Happening (2021), All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), Poor Things (2023) and The Room Next Door (2024). Jarmusch’s three-part study of dysfunctional families didn’t make for the likeliest of winners especially next to Ben Hania’s incendiary agitprop. The titular Hind is a six-year-old girl from Gaza City whose family was massacred by Israeli forces as they drove to safety. Hind was the only survivor; trapped in the car next to her dead aunt, uncle and three cousins, she called the Red Crescent offices in Ramallah for help. Ben Hania weaves the actual 70-minute recording of the girl’s pleas within a film that reenacts her conversations with four workers who tried to arrange her rescue: Omar (Motaz Malhees), Rana (Saja Kilani), Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), and Nisreen (Clara Khoury). For 90 excruciating minutes, Ben Hania serves up as a furious indictment of a genocide that’s claimed the lives of over 18,000 other children—that Hind Rajab “demands to be seen in a theater” is because that’s the only setting where you won’t be able to pause or look away from all the horrors.
The first “Palestinian” film unveiled at the festival was, in 1935, Juda Leman’s The Land of Promise, a piece of Zionist propaganda commissioned by United Israel Appeal that celebrated the settlers’ accomplishments and encouraged investment in the land’s burgeoning Jewish communities. That was still a few years before the Nakba, and long before the ongoing genocide in Gaza which loomed large over this edition. In the days leading up to the festival, Venice4Palestine, a collective of Italian and international industry professionals, issued an open letter demanding that the Biennale condemn the destruction wrought by Israel’s military campaign in the Strip, and withdraw invitations to Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler—co-stars in Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante—over their support for Netanyahu’s government. “We have never hesitated to clearly declare our huge sadness vis-à-vis what is happening in Gaza, in Palestine,” Barbera told the press; even so, he clarified, the Biennale would not rescind invites over the war. In the end, Gadot didn’t show up; pressed about his casting choices, Schnabel said he was against boycotting artists, but declined to weigh in on the humanitarian crisis in Palestine (“I think we should talk about the movie rather than this issue”). That was the same noncommittal answer other guests fell back on—jury president Alexander Payne himself claimed he was “a little bit unprepared for that question; I’m here to judge and talk about cinema.” Then, on Saturday, August 30, thousands gathered on the Lido to march from Piazza Santa Maria Elisabetta toward the Palazzo del Cinema. A sea of Palestinian flags waved by the red carpet; as Venice retreated deeper into its bubble, the outside world threatened to burst it.
Hind Rajab catalyzed the rage that coursed through the festival long before opening night, speaking truth to power like nothing else I saw on the Lido this year. Whether Ben Hania successfully combines real and fictional material is a different question. Hind’s story was sufficiently documented in early 2024 for its tragic ending not to count as a spoiler—both she and the ambulance workers sent to rescue her were brutally murdered by Israeli soldiers. But Ben Hania couches her drama as a nail-biting thriller. Even as we never step outside the Red Crescent offices in Ramallah, Juan Sarmiento G.’s handheld camerawork and the rapid editing swell the film into a frantic race against time. Throughout, Hind Rajab lingers on the technology bridging our distance from the child and the Strip—we don’t just listen to her voice but watch the audio bars of the recording fluctuate on a computer screen in scenes that makes them resemble a heart’s beat on an EKG machine. It would take an ambulance eight minutes to reach the girl; it takes the Red Crescent staff hours to receive the green light from the Red Cross and Israeli army (among many other things, Hind Rajab is a perceptive study of the administrative pageantry behind the genocide). Once the vehicle leaves the hospital, we watch its icon on a digital aerial map of the city inching ever so slowly toward the point where Hind awaits her rescuers. These flourishes are absolutely superfluous; Hind’s recordings are so harrowing there’s no need to heighten their power. It bears noting that Hind Rajab was made in collaboration with and with permission from the child’s family, yet there’s something queasy about its attempt to mine suspense from the tragedy. Devastating as it is, the film struggles to synthesize its source material and the genre trappings Ben Hania forces onto it.
For another work that used archives to lacerating effect, see Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra Tierra. In 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the indigenous Chuschagasta community, was shot dead by a landowner and two former cops in his native Tucumán, Argentina. Grainy footage of the assassination, recorded on a low-quality phone, was used as evidence to convict the three white men in 2018, and Martel squeezes excerpts of the clip into her chronicle of their trial. Nuestra Tierra is her first nonfiction feature, but in couching Chocobar’s death as a clash between core and periphery, between haves and have-nots, it feels thematically contiguous with the rest of her oeuvre. As the action moves from the courthouse to Tucumán, Martel’s focus grows wider. Nuestra Tierra pivots from Chocobar’s story to a much larger portrait of his community and its ongoing battles against land dispossession. In Tucumán, she follows the three defendants and a few Chuschagastas as they reenact the murder before the judge. Which is to say that Nuestra Tierra is a work of fiction, preoccupied with the recreation of the barbaric act at its center as well as questioning the colonial narratives that have allowed similar crimes to go unpunished.
What is substantially novel is the visual language. Nuestra Tierra opens in outer space, before descending to earth and flying over Tucumán in protracted drone shots of the rugged region. This is new camerawork for Martel, but the frequent bird’s-eye interludes gradually take on a hypnotic quality, as does the mountainous landscape they capture. Old, black-and-white photographs of Chocobar and the Chuschagastas crop up throughout, but Martel chooses to “score” these images with faint sounds of the actions they immortalize—we see people dancing and hear their chatter rising with the music, a piñata popping from a tree and the snap echoing with the laughter of children. These noises were not recreated through foley work; Martel matched the audio from hours of phone videos handed to her by Chuschagastas to the photographs. It’s a choice that helps her animate ostensibly inert material, and it also posits cinema as a means to agitate and bear witness. By the time Nuestra Tierra closes with a shot of the Chuschagastas sitting around a projector and watching clips recorded by members of the community, the film itself becomes a breathing, ever-growing archive—a corrective to a systematic attempt to obliterate a people and its history.
That’s one way of looking at the cinema of Mark Jenkin. Set in his native Cornwall, his works have long homed in on the erosion of its customs and ways of life, blaming the loss on rampant gentrification, rising costs and unchecked tourism. Rose of Nevada follows in their footsteps. As the titular fishing boat magically appears at the old harbor of an unidentified Cornish village—30 years after being lost at sea with all hands—a three-man crew ships it back out, hoping to bring new luck to the depopulated town. Crusty skipper Murgey (Francis Magee) recruits two young men as his assistants: Liam (Callum Turner) enlists to escape from his past; Nick (George MacKay) to provide for his young wife and child. But no sooner do they return from the first successful trip that something feels amiss; the journey brought them back in time, and the hamlet welcomes them as if they were the original, long-defunct crew. Jenkin’s cinema has routinely blurred the line between past and present; even when technically set in the latter, his films are rife with incongruities that jam your temporal bearings. That’s often a function of the production design. In Rose of Nevada, several items adorning Nick’s room (a tape player, some cassettes, a poster) intimate a bygone epoch long before Jenkin rewinds to the early 1990s. But nothing feels more anachronistic than his films’ aesthetic. As with the rest of his oeuvre, Jenkin shot Rose of Nevada on celluloid, with a clockwork Bolex H16 with a maximum runtime of 28 seconds per take—the same camera he used for Bait (2019) and its follow-up, Enys Men (2022). Granted, the visuals this time aren’t as unstable or confounding as they were in the monochrome Bait or the terrific short Bronco’s House (2015). Unlike those predecessors, Rose of Nevada was not hand-processed, but it’s similarly prone to scratches and red-light leak flashes. Those irregularities are a hallmark of Jenkin’s artistry—not “aberrations,” but proof of his cinema’s mysterious exuberance.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call Rose of Nevada a discovery. If anything, it’s more of a summation of its director’s thematic and aesthetic concerns. But in an edition paved with conventional, mediocre titles, Jenkin’s stood out as a fulgent outlier. Few filmmakers working today can rival the vitality his frames so effortlessly invoke. Where others might turn to celluloid as an exercise in nostalgia, Jenkin embraces it out of an unwavering belief in its capacity to surprise. Every imperfection opens up the material in unexpected ways; nothing in his cinema is ever static. “It’s that unpredictability,” Jenkin says in his 2023 short A Dog Called Discord, “that keeps me hooked.” As the boat braved the Atlantic, borne back ceaselessly into the past, weathered images and clangorous soundscapes conjured something exhilarating: the feeling of watching a director leading his craft and audience into new, uncharted waters.
