Ukrainian filmmaker challenges EU's Venice funding cut as 'kindergarten punishment'

Sergei Loznitsa arrived at the Venice film festival this week carrying a sharp critique of European politics dressed up as cultural principle. The Ukrainian filmmaker, whose 2014 documentary Maidan and last year's drama Two Prosecutors have earned him international standing, was there to premiere his new work Imperium. But his real message concerned something happening outside the cinema: the European Commission's decision to strip €2 million in funding from the Venice Biennale after it allowed Russia to open its pavilion for the first time since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Loznitsa called the funding cut "a punishment in kindergarten." He meant it as a rebuke not to the Biennale's decision to host Russia, but to the EU's priorities. Yes, he said, he would never visit the Russian pavilion himself. But the row over its existence struck him as performative theater masking a far graver failure. In the second quarter of 2026, European companies imported Russian liquified gas at levels 17 percent higher than the same period the year before—money flowing directly into Russian military spending. Yet the EU's response to cultural diplomacy was swift and severe, while its energy policy remained entangled with Moscow's economy. "The question I ask myself is this: can the existence of this Russian pavilion stop this war or not?" Loznitsa said. "What I do know is that in the second quarter of this year, European companies imported gas from Russia at unprecedented levels, and all that money goes straight into bombs that fall on Ukraine."

The Biennale's management pushed back against the Commission's action, arguing that the terminated grant had funded the cinema department's activities—the Biennale College and Venice Production Bridge—which had nothing to do with Russia's participation in the visual arts exhibition. The Russian pavilion's show, titled The Tree is Rooted in the Sky, had been accessible only during the pre-opening vernissage and closed to the public from May 9 onward. Yet the funding cut threatened to damage the film festival itself, which maintains institutional independence from the Biennale but depends on its financial infrastructure. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale's president, delivered a confrontational speech accusing the Commission of "abandoning our journey," insisting the institution was engaged in international artistic research, not politics.

This year's Venice film festival lineup carries unmistakable political weight. Alongside Loznitsa's Imperium, which examines Soviet propaganda through archival footage shot by Italian filmmakers between 1970 and 1973, the program includes Alexandre Smia's Jupiter, a geopolitical thriller about a Russian president seeking retribution after a failed assassination attempt; Andrei Kutsila's animated documentary on political repression in Belarus; and Julia Loktev's five-hour work My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, following Russian dissident journalists from TV Rain who fled after the invasion. Loktev's film grapples directly with the boundary between journalism and propaganda, showing the journalists confronting their own language and complicity as they register their network in Latvia.

The inclusion of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's Dau sparked a different kind of controversy. The Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs raised "profound concern" over the film, which tells the story of a Soviet physicist who contributed to the first atomic bomb. The ministry noted that Khrzhanovsky's multi-film project, once described as a "Stalinist Truman Show," received funding from sanctioned Russian businessman Sergey Adonyev and features a protagonist, conductor Teodor Currentzis, who accepted Russian citizenship from Putin. "Russia has long used culture as an instrument of state policy and hybrid warfare," the ministry stated, warning that the Kremlin deploys culture to restore respectability to sanctioned figures and legitimize its presence where military force cannot.

Alberto Barbera, the festival's artistic director, rejected this framing. He noted that Dau was principally shot between 2008 and 2011, before current geopolitical tensions crystallized, and that its funding came from Germany, France, and Sweden. "It is not a Russian film; it is not pro-Putin propaganda," Barbera wrote on social media. "It is a film that denounces totalitarian regimes and their intrusion into citizens' lives to restrict their freedom." The distinction matters: unlike the Venice art Biennale, where national pavilions carry state representation, the film festival's submissions are attributed to directors, not countries. Loznitsa's Imperium itself received support from Germany, Italy, France, and Lithuania.

Loznitsa's own film carries particular weight in this context. Shot entirely from archival footage, it traces the journey of Italian Communist Party-approved filmmakers into the Soviet Union across three expeditions between 1970 and 1973. The footage was meant to project Soviet unity—red flags, patriotic anthems, the machinery of state propaganda. But as the camera moves outward from Moscow into the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the images fracture. Local customs, throat singing, reindeer racing, village wrestling—these emphasize cultural difference rather than cohesion. Urban Russians parading through streets with guitars encounter visible skepticism from local people. The propaganda, Loznitsa observed, was simply ineffective. "I wanted to show that the Soviet Union collapsed not just for economic reasons, but also because it was impossible to keep so many different cultures under one roof," he said. In one scene, a small tractor carries portraits of politburo members through a muddy, forlorn Dagestani landscape. "It's a bit like the Russian pavilion in Venice now," Loznitsa reflected. "As propaganda, it's just so ridiculous."