Venice Film Festival 2025
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“I Needed to Rely on What I Knew”: Lucrecia Martel on Her First Documentary, “Landmarks”
“To tell you the truth, I was actually quite scared about making a documentary.” It’s a luminous morning in early September and Lucrecia Martel is chewing mate leaves in the restaurant room of a hotel a stone’s throw away from the Adriatic. Her latest, Landmarks, is her first nonfiction work, but to insist on the apparent break from the rest of her oeuvre feels misleading. A chronicle of the trial for the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar—a member of the indigenous Chuschagasta community killed by a white landowner and two former cops in Tucumán, Argentina—the film still speaks to her […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 25, 2025 -
Ides of March: The 2025 Venice Film Festival
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 […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 15, 2025 -
“We Put All the Magical Emphasis on the Stork World”: Tamara Kotevska on Her Toronto (and Venice) debuting “The Tale of Silyan”
The Tale of Silyan is the latest painstakingly crafted cinematic endeavor from Tamara Kotevska, co-director of the 2019 Sundance-winning (in three categories) and 2020 Oscar-nominated (in two) Honeyland; it’s a film certain to continue the awards-nabbing streak. Set in the village with the greatest number of white storks in Macedonia, the title refers to a 17th century folktale featuring a rebellious boy named Silyan whose father curses him for wanting to flee the hard work on the family farm — turning him into a stork, condemned to a life of eternal migration. The title also refers to one of the real-life […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 11, 2025 -
“Something Sent to Me by the Film Gods to Break the Spell of Tragedy”: Ross McElwee on His Venice-Premiering Remake
You don’t need to have watched Ross McElwee’s films over the years in order to be moved by Remake, in which his ongoing saga of art and life collides in freshly shattering ways with the unlikely prospect of a Hollywood deal and the unthinkable death of his son Adrian. But if you have been following along (or catching up) with his journey from Sherman’s March through to Photographic Memory, the personal loss can all feel that much more poignant, as if you know him personally. That’s a function of his incredibly skillful, essayistic voice (and voiceover), in movies that are—as […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 11, 2025 -
“A Form of Primal Theater”: Federico Cammarata and Filippo Foscarini on their Venice-debuting Waking Hours
Waking Hours is the auspicious, Venice-premiering feature debut of cinematic collaborators Federico Cammarata and Filippo Foscarini, graduates of the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Palermo. With Cammarata handling camerawork, Foscarini on sound, the duo have been working as a two-man team since their 2020 award-winning, mid-length doc Tardo Agosto. And their less-is-more approach shows (and then some). The film stems from the simplest of premises: a group of Afghan smugglers who’ve set up camp along the border between Serbia, Croatia and Hungary spend their nights smoking and chatting by the fire (the only source of light) when not discussing prices […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 3, 2025 -
“I Went Outside with the Idea, ‘This is My Last Day'”: Charlie Kaufman and Eva HD on Their Venice-Premiering “How to Shoot a Ghost”
Her face obscured in shadow, a woman, the poet, Eva HD, takes a photograph. Cut to words on the screen, a quote from another poet, Toni Morrison: “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.” The paradox created by the juxtaposition of those words and that image animates How to Shoot a Ghost, Charlie Kaufman’s new Venice-premiering short film, written by HD, that sensuously and melancholically tangles with ideas around history, memory, cities and where consciousness goes when the body dies. Set in Athens, Greece, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2025
