Venice Film Festival pivots to politics with Gaza, Ukraine documentaries

The Venice Film Festival has spent the last decade cultivating a particular image: red carpets, movie stars, the machinery of awards season in its finest clothes. This year, the 83rd edition opening September 2 looks fundamentally different. The festival's artistic director, Alberto Barbera, has assembled a program he describes as Venice's "most political" ever—one that trades glamour for urgency, and uses cinema as a vehicle for reckoning with the world's most contested conflicts.

The shift is deliberate and unmistakable. Danny Boyle's opening film, "Ink," traces Rupert Murdoch's 1969 takeover of The Sun tabloid, the origin point of a right-wing media empire. But the real weight of the festival lies in what follows over eleven days on the Lido. There is "Naza," a documentary from Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that examines Israeli military killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. There is Julia Loktev's "My Undesirable Friends Part II — Exile," a chronicle of Vladimir Putin's crackdown on independent journalism in Russia. Andrei Kutsila's "Letters From the Silenced Country," a co-production involving Deutsche Welle, ZDF/Arte, and Polish television, documents repression in Belarus and will premiere here. Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary on Elon Musk—a film Musk has already denounced as a "hit piece" without seeing it—will screen in competition. And Laura Poitras, the Oscar-winning director of "Citizenfour," will present "They're Here," a documentary she made with Rachel Lauren Mueller using previously undisclosed footage of ICE deportation raids in Minneapolis last January.

This represents a sharp departure from Venice's recent identity. For years, under Barbera's direction, the festival had cultivated itself as a place for movie stars and Oscar campaigns—the venue where you went to see Timothée Chalamet on the red carpet or watch George Clooney and Brad Pitt trade jokes at a press conference. Berlin and, to a lesser extent, Cannes had claimed the territory of political cinema and the contentious debates that accompany it. Venice had chosen a different lane.

But Berlin's reputation as a festival for activist cinema has fractured. Over the past three years, political argument—primarily centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—has overwhelmed discussions of cinema itself at the Berlinale, to the point where the festival's future now looks uncertain. At this year's edition, jury president Wim Wenders faced online backlash for suggesting that filmmakers "have to stay out of politics." Days later, when Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah Al-Khatib called out the German government at the awards ceremony for being "partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel," the fallout nearly cost Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle her position. The festival, in other words, has become a battleground rather than a forum.

Venice, by contrast, has spent the past two years leaning directly into political cinema without flinching. Last year, Kaouther Ben Hania's "The Voice of Hind Rajab" premiered here—a docudrama that recreates the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl and her family by Israeli forces in Gaza City. The film received a 22-minute standing ovation, a Lido record. Thousands marched on the island in protest of the war in Gaza. Filmmakers called on Barbera to label Israel's campaign "a genocide." He declined to use that language, speaking instead of his "huge sadness" over the suffering in Gaza and Palestine. But he did not retreat from programming the film, and he has not retreated now.

That steadiness is being tested. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry, Culture Ministry, and its embassy in Italy have filed a formal complaint over Barbera's decision to include Ilya Khrzhanovsky's "DAU," an art house drama about life under Soviet rule in Ukraine, in official competition. Khrzhanovsky is Russian-born, though he renounced his citizenship and now lives in exile in Berlin. The film's lead, conductor Teodor Currentzis, still lives and works in Russia and has never publicly condemned the war on Ukraine. The Ukrainian government's statement said the programming decision "sends a deeply worrying signal" given the ongoing conflict. Barbera has called the criticism a "smear campaign" from people who have not seen the film. Khrzhanovsky responded on Facebook on August 20: "'DAU' is not an instrument of Russian state cultural policy. It is an artistic statement about the nature of totalitarian evil."

Venice has not abandoned the machinery of stardom entirely. Robert Pattinson will arrive for "Primetime," playing a controversial US reality television producer. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell appear as CIA agents in Martin McDonagh's "Wild Horse Nine," set on the eve of the Pinochet coup in Chile. Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz star as a married couple in Florian Zeller's "Bunker," about an architect commissioned to build a nuclear shelter for a billionaire. George Clooney and the 93-year-old Ellen Burstyn will be on hand to receive Golden Lion awards for lifetime achievement. Wim Wenders, fresh from the Berlin controversy, brings a gentler work—a 3D documentary on Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. Werner Herzog returns to narrative filmmaking for the first time in seven years with "Bucking Fastard," starring real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara. And for those seeking escape, Liam and Noel Gallagher are expected for the premiere of the Oasis reunion documentary "Don't Look Back in Anger."

But the festival's center of gravity has shifted. Barbera has made a calculated choice: to position Venice not as a refuge from the world's conflicts, but as a space where cinema engages them directly. Whether that choice holds—whether the festival can sustain both the glamour and the gravity—will become clear over the next eleven days.