With wars still raging in the Middle East and Ukraine — and turbulence escalating globally — artists on the film festival circuit have been navigating political minefields. At the Berlin Film Festival in February, jury president Wim Wenders came under fire for saying that film directors should “stay out of politics” as he fielded questions from the press about Israel and Palestine. The backlash against Wenders’ statement was fierce; author Arundhati Roy, for one, pulled out of the festival in anger.
Berlin’s artistic director, Tricia Tuttle, had to issue a formal statement regarding the media storm that threatened to engulf the festival. In Cannes, thousands of film professionals, including stars Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo and director Ken Loach, signed a petition that blasted the increasing ideological influence of right-wing billionaire Vincent Bolloré, the majority shareholder of pay-TV powerhouse Canal+ and France’s biggest investor in movies. Audiences even booed the Canal+ and StudioCanal logos when they appeared in the credits of films the companies financed.
Then political discourse in Cannes veered into a raging debate over the use of AI in film. Juror Demi Moore urged the industry to find ways to both work with and protect itself from artificial intelligence. With politics having rattled Berlin and Cannes, how will it play out in Venice?
Political discourse surrounding Russia and Israel hit the Lido even before the festival could begin. In April, the Biennale art exhibition — run by the Venice Biennale Foundation, which also runs the film festival — was slammed for allowing Russia and Israel to mount shows in their pavilions. Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco is now trading blows with the European Commission, which has pulled $2.3 million in funding for the foundation, claiming that European taxpayers’ money “should safeguard democratic values,” as an EU spokesperson put it to Variety, adding that those values “are not respected in today’s Russia.” Buttafuoco declined to be interviewed for this story.
But during the Venice selection press conference in July, he blasted Brussels for applying a double standard. Buttafuoco’s assertion is that by statute, the Biennale is a censorship-free “space of cultural coexistence” for the whole world. Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera agrees.
Barbera calls this year’s Venice selection “the most political one in recent years.” When Barbera announced the fest lineup on July 23, he said the selection “reflects major contemporary issues: wars, of course; Palestine; immigration; climate change; growing social tensions; and the shrinking spaces of freedom to the detriment of opponents of various regimes.” Aptly, Venice will open with Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” which exposes how British tabloid The Sun propelled Rupert Murdoch’s rise to right-wing media mogul. (It is produced by Bolloré-controlled StudioCanal.) The festival is also screening Alex Gibney’s documentary “Musk,” an in-depth investigation that goes behind the public persona of Elon Musk and is among the standouts in a range of movies launching from the Lido poised to push political hot buttons. Russia’s deep malaise will feature prominently in several Venice films, one being Julia Loktev’s “My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile,” which follows independent Russian journalists across roughly 13 countries as they navigate life in forced exile. And U.S. ills in the age of President Donald Trump are the subject of Laura Poitras’ documentary short “They’re Here,” about protests in Minnesota against the ICE raids that resulted in 4,000 arrests and two fatal shootings.
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