The theme that emerged at this 82nd Venice Film Festival was inevitably political. More precisely, that of politics as horror. As maximum horror. The place in question, as we know, is Gaza. The unpunished and persistently repeat offender is the Israeli government. Its equally repeat accomplice is the entire West, with Italy by no means excluded. Therefore, one can well understand the twenty-two minutes of applause (this time it really is worth counting them) that followed the screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania: the Tunisian director who with this film (also supported by stars like Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix as producers) totally immerses the viewer in this horror. Great then the disappointment for the failure to award this work the Golden Lion? Beyond the damage, then the insult of relegating it to second place alongside a film (Smashing Machine) dedicated to “images of domination and destruction” embodied by an American fighter, a true “destructive machine”, according to the words of director Benny Safdie himself? A symbol of the victims of contemporary maximum horror placed therefore on equal merit with a symbol of the most gratuitous and spectacular violence: strange as well as significant coincidence, there’s no denying it! But let’s leave aside the disappointment. Or do we want to imagine living in a world where justice triumphs?
“The Voice Of Hind Rajab” by Kaouther Ben Hania, main cast: Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury, Motaz Malhees, Saja Kilani, Tunisia, Francia, 89’, ph. courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
As an institution, the Venice Film Festival cannot but participate in the torments of Italian and European opinion. An opinion that finds itself in the strange situation of being more divided than ever between rulers and ruled or, if you prefer, between those who can do most and those who can do nothing or almost nothing. Without citing many statistics, it is indeed well known (except to so much mainstream press) that in our continent many so-called supreme authorities have minimal or less than minimal consensus on a bunch of crucial issues like current wars and those increasingly confidently predicted. In such a situation, how can one expect that the systematic ties, including military ones, between Israeli and Western leaders, Italians included, could be marred by a Golden Lion that is not diplomatically compliant? Should we then resign ourselves to the realpolitik that led The Voice of Hind Rajab to second place? Should we therefore content ourselves with the fact that the winner Jim Jarmusch with his Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, does not hide his rejection of Israeli policies and his favor for the Palestinian cause? Will it suffice, in short, to register and emphasize the fact that the horror underway in Gaza is increasingly less tolerated even among cultivators and lovers of the seventh art? Not exactly. Beneath the tip of this chronicle data, there is in fact a whole dark and deep iceberg to reckon with. The horror presented by the live voice of Hind Rajab and its context represented by Kaouther Ben Hania’s film, in their piercing tragedy, can be listened to and observed as abyssal symptoms, not only of what is happening in Gaza, but also of how cinema as a whole, if it doesn’t want to betray itself, is forced to relate to reality. In other words, the impression left by this 82nd festival is anything but comforting: it puts us face to face with a world full of horrors, where cinema is not beautiful unless it deals with the most extreme ugliness. Too exaggerated? Perhaps. But I cannot otherwise justify my preferences in the vast offering of films at this festival.
“Father Mother Sister Brother” by Jim Jarmusch, main cast: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Sarah Greene, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, Françoise Lebrun, USA, Ireland, France, 110’, ph. courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
In my very personal and therefore arbitrary ranking, in fact, after The Voice of Hind Rajab come the French Grand Ciel, the Taiwanese Nühai (Girl), the Thai The Funeral Casino Blues, the Colombian Barrio Triste and the Italian La Valle dei Sorrisi. The first (presented in the Horizons section, directed by Akiro Hata – Japanese by birth, but French by professional choice – with Damien Bonnard as lead actor) with involuntary comedy and very little sensitivity has sometimes been presented as a science fiction film, thus obliterating its extreme topicality. To understand something more, the interview with the director and main actor is recommended (www.youtube.com). The crucial theme is the current condition of manual labor, what would once have been called that of the bricklayer, within a mega construction site that promises to make possible a new technologically advanced neighborhood. The total absence of protections for workers, especially if “sans papiers,” the careerism as ruthless as it is tormented, the aggressiveness of timing and chain of command in the execution programs of the gigantic building: all these aspects are perfectly portrayed in this dark fresco in which the danger of work reveals itself in all its murderous monstrosity. The labyrinthine basements perpetually to be rebuilt reveal themselves possessed by the spirit of some invisible exterminating Minotaur animated by the blind urgency of the construction site managers.
“Grand ciel” by Akihiro Hata, main cast: Damien Bonnard, Samir Guesmi, Mouna Soualem, Francia, Lussemburgo, 92’, ph. courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
As for the Taiwanese competition film Nühai (Girl) (directed by Shu Qi, starring Bai Xiao-Ying, Joanne Tang Yu-chi (9m88) and Roy Chiu) it tells of the coercions bordering on torture suffered by three generations of women, whose daily vicissitudes are described and portrayed admirably. Under indictment without mitigating circumstances are the cultural conformisms without escape, moreover vainly dismissible as pertaining only to the Far East, being instead well recognizable also as “our thing”. The Funeral Casino Blues is instead the work presented in the Horizons section by German director Roderik Warich, with main performers Jutamat Lamoon, Wason Dokkathum and Jutarat Burinok, all Thai. The thematic focus here is the life of Bangkok girls who, also due to traditional customs unknown elsewhere, dedicate themselves to prostitution. Gambling debts, arrears to be settled, economic necessities of families residing outside the immense metropolitan area serve as background and incentive to such activities exercised apparently almost for play. Even love, the romantic one, is sometimes not lacking in possibility. The dangers however loom and cause the not infrequent disappearance of girls prey to the perversions of foreign clients. The film makes an intense and effective denunciation of this, but gives in to the temptation to get lost in improbable as well as predictable “ghostly” scenarios.
“Nühai (Girl)” by Shu Qi, main cast: Roy Chiu, 9m88, Bai Xiao-Ying, Taipei, 124’, ph. courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
To Stillz, a young and ostentatiously mysterious photographer (www.4pareteita.it), we owe the direction of Barrio Triste (Horizons section), where a series of vicissitudes and torments afflicting a hopeless and aspirationless youth is portrayed, living in the most degraded periphery situated in the hills overlooking Medellín: the Colombian city, famous for being the world’s maximum center for cocaine dealing and war between enemy cartels, at least during all the eighties. Although these are precisely the years in which the film’s events take place, it dedicates no direct mention to them, preferring to intersperse sequences of crude and realistic images of neighborhood life with splatter and horror scenes sometimes completely fantastic, perhaps allusive of the unspeakable collective tragedy underway. All this, appreciating the genre, is certainly impactful also thanks to the intense accompanying music by Venezuelan singer-songwriter Arca (www.giornaledellamusica.it). Of the out-of-competition film directed by Paolo Strippoli La Valle dei Sorrisi and the as always impeccable interpretation by Michele Riondino, one should note the accurate and penetrating study of the apparently jovial behaviors of a small mountain community besieged by fierce memories of a collective tragedy far from having been processed. One can moreover object that such a convincing representation of an ordinarily experienced horror did not necessarily have to let itself be seduced by those stylemes more typical of the splatter or horror genre also insistent here.
“Barrio triste” By Stillz, main cast: Juan Pablo Baena, Samuel Velazquez, Tomas Tinoco Higuita, Bryan Erlin Garcia, Samuel Andres Celis, Brahian Acecedo, Samuel Ruiz, Estiven Salazar, Jose Arley Marin Gonzalez, Colombia, USA, 88’, ph. courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
Moral of the story? Two annotations. One concerns precisely the recourse, as we have seen frequent in the cited films, to these macabre or gruesome stylemes that are fundamentally caricatural of true horror: stylemes that are nothing but “special effects” aimed at shaking at any cost and perhaps even just for a moment the emotions of the spectator, as well as sedating the fear of filmmakers of not succeeding in more convincing ways. Certainly, a sign of our times, which know all too many real horrors. Yet, also a sign of lost opportunities: the opportunities to make people think about the why of such nefarious occurrences and therefore how to try to deal with them, instead of getting lost among fleetingly over-excited feelings.
“La valle dei sorrisi” by Paolo Strippoli, main cast: Michele Riondino, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Giulio Feltri, Paolo Pierobon, Italia, Slovenia, 123’, ph. courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
Another concerns the immense merit and great responsibility that cinema has today: perhaps today more than ever. In our days, what is the art or cultural phenomenon capable, in fact, of arousing the desire to reflect and discuss serious things about how we are doing, what we are doing or where we are going, as humanity? Immersing oneself in an important Film Festival like Venice Biennale, it is precisely about such things that surprisingly, despite chaos and background noise, one happens to hear the otherwise disheveled crowd of spectators discuss here and there. Therefore, yes, as users of the seventh art let us seek and find ways to ask more and more of those who make cinema, to really do it, not giving themselves peace, not finding escapes from the responsibilities that fall to them. Let us admit and make them recognize that our destinies, beyond where and who we are or where we live, also depend on how and where cinema goes.
Info:
www.labiennale.org/it/cinema/2025
Valerio Romitelli (born in Bologna in 1948) taught, researched and lectured in Italy and abroad. His disciplines: History of political doctrines, History of political movements and parties, Methodology of the social sciences. Among his latest publications: L’amore della politica (2014), La felicità dei partigiani e la nostra (2017), L’enigma dell’Ottobre ‘17 (2017), L’emancipazione a venire. Dopo la fine della storia (2022).
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