For most of its 82 years, Venice has been perceived as the world’s most glamorous film festival. This year was no exception: stars including Julia Roberts, Cate Blanchett, Jude Law and George Clooney dutifully waved from canals and trooped down red carpets (although Law tripped while on a water taxi and Clooney got ill).
But the films themselves struck a different note. Jury president Alexander Payne may have rebutted questions about current affairs during his opening press conference, declaring himself concerned only with discussing cinema, but cinema at Venice this year was concerned largely, it turned out, with discussing current events.
The big hits of the festival were both nailbiting ticking-clock stories – directed by women – that tackled real-world situations of such tragedy and magnitude that many people shy from discussing them, let alone make a movie about them.
Towards the end of the festival, The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s dramatisation of the killing by the Israel Defense Forces of a five-year-old girl in Gaza, earned a 23-minute standing ovation, as well as chants around the auditorium of “Free Palestine”.
The film uses the real audio of Rajab’s phone call with emergency call handlers, where she pleads to be rescued from the car in which she was trapped after Israeli tank fire killed the family members around her. During the January 2024 incident, the ambulance sent to reach Rajab also came under attack and the two paramedics on board were killed. Rajab’s body, as well as those of her relatives and the paramedics were 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 one tool that I have 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, put audiences repeatedly through the 18 minute period from the launch of a nuclear strike on the US until its landing, from the point of view of, variously, a soldier, military leader and the president (played by Idris Elba). Bigelow said she had made the film in an desperate attempt to kickstart conversations about a nuclear treaty.
“The film is an invitation to decide what to do about all these weapons,” she said. “How is annihilating the world a good defensive measure?”
Elsewhere, the evidence mounted that cinema is increasingly acting as a quasi-urgent response unit to help audiences interpret a chaotic world. Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, Bugonia, stars Emma Stone as a high-powered executive kidnapped by conspiracy theorists convinced she is an alien intent on destroying Earth. Confirming the film as an allegory for inertia over tackling a 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-serving employee fired from his role in a manufacturing plant who feels forced to eliminate all competitors for a future post. “We all harbour that deep fear of employment insecurity,” said Park. “Anyone who’s out there trying to make a living in the current 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 Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin. While Law sought to downplay the film’s contemporary relevance, his director was less abashed, declaring: “The film is very much about how modern politics, 21st-century politics, was invented, and part of that evil raised from the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in Russia.”
Such eagerness by film-makers for direct political engagement appears unlikely to wane. Announcing their lineup on Friday, the San Sebastián film festival director also issued a long statement calling for end to the “genocide … the unimaginable massacres to which the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is subjecting the Palestinian people.”
Meanwhile in London on Wednesday evening, Hugh Bonneville took an ITV reporter by surprise when he began his comments on the red carpet by saying: “What’s about to happen in Gaza City is indefensible. The international community must do more to bring it to an end.” He then continued: “Downton Abbey’s a lovely film.”