Thoughts on the Venice 2025 Lineup

As part of my work for the Latin American Film Festival of Dallas (LAFFD), I’m obliged to keep up with a lot of films and festivals from all over the world. Venice is a tough festival scheduling-wise as it comes late in the calendar and the films that in theory I would want to get are holding out for bigger festivals for their US premiere. There’s also the matter of the big films that play here do get eventual theatrical distribution (Kill the Jockey, I’m Still Here) so you’re left looking at sidebars for potential films. Anyway, let’s look at the lineup.

Competition

The Wizard of the Kremlin (Olivier Assayas) / Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach) / The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther ben Hania) / A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow) / Sun Rises on Us All (Cai Shangjun) / Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro) / Elisa (Leonardo Di Costanzo) / À pied d’œuvre (Valérie Donzelli) / Silent Friend (Ildikó Enyedi) / The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold) / Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch) / Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) / Duse (Pietro Marcello) / Un film fatto per bene (Franco Maresco) / Orphan (Laszlo Nemes) / The Stranger (François Ozon) / No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook) / Sotto le nuvole (Gianfranco Rosi) / The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie) / Girl (Shu Qi) / La Grazia (Paolo Sorrentino)

It goes without saying that I’ve seen none of these films. They could be good, they could be bad. But what is clear is that to make it to this stage you need power behind you. You need a 40-year career, you need movie stars, you need Netflix, you need potential Oscar nominations, you need to be an Italian guy. Those that don’t have those things are the true outliers of the competition. And what is the ratio between these factions? To speak plainly, this is not a space for discovery, it is a space for confirmation. It reads as a capitulation toward industry, toward brand names. In an interview the artistic director Alberto Barbera says that they passed on the latest film by Edward Berger, Ballad of a Small Player, because having four Netflix versus three would’ve been “overdoing it.” Later, he states that the streamers are the only ones with the “necessary resources to make auteur cinema,” and that most of what Netflix makes doesn’t interest them, saying that they are just a “product for straight-to-platform consumption.” But, of course, the films that Barbera has selected are products all the same - they all get consumed in the end. Rather than these exercises in auteur brand management (regardless of how I feel about the filmmakers), I am way more interested in those films that pop up randomly on these services and bypass these traditional avenues (a film like Takahiro Miki’s Drawing Closer does not exist for Alberto Barbera, for example). Anyway! I suppose there’s nothing wrong with all this, but it means that I have my mind made up on a lot of these filmmakers already. To sum up, I’d watch the Assayas and Bigelow happily. I’d give a chance to the Shu Qi (she has done so much for us in the last 30 years), the Park, the Maresco (what’s going on here?), the Cai (the wild card). The rest I could probably live without. Nothing from Latin America here, for what it’s worth.

Out of Competition (Fiction)

Sermon to the Void (Hilal Baydarov) / L’isola di Andrea (Antonio Capuano) / Il Maestro (Andrea Di Stefano) / After the Hunt (Luca Guadagnino) / Scarlet (Mamoru Hosoda) / The Last Viking (Anders Thomas Jensen) / Chien 51 (Cédric Jimenez) / In the Hand of Dante (Julian Schnabel) / La valle dei sorrisi (Paolo Strippoli) / Dead Man’s Wire (Gus Van Sant) / Orfeo (Virgilio Villoresi)

Out of Competition (Non-Fiction)

Kabul, Between Prayers (Aboozar Amini) / Ferdinando Scianna - Il fotografo dell’ombra (Roberto Andò) / Marc by Sofia (Sofia Coppola) / I diari di Angela - Noi due cineasti. Capitolo Terzo (Yervant Gianikian + Angela Ricci Lucchi) / Ghost Elephants (Werner Herzog) / My Father and Qaddafi (Jihan K) / The Tale of Silyan (Tamara Kotevska) / Nuestra Tierra (Lucrecia Martel) / Remake (Ross McElwee) / Kim Novak’s Vertigo (Alexandre Philippe) / Cover-Up (Laura Poitras + Mark Obenhaus) / Broken English (Jane Pollard + Iain Forsyth) / Notes of a True Criminal (Alexander Rodnyansky + Andriy Alferov) / Director’s Diary (Alexandr Sokurov) / Back Home (Tsai Ming Liang)

The Out of Competition by itself is a murderer’s row of names. But, unfortunately, many are working in the wrong formats for the competition - anime (Hosoda), documentary (Martel, Tsai, Herzog), Gus Van Sant (Gus Van Sant). These are not small names. So we go back to the original issue. Why those and not these? The Martel case is particularly egregious. Back when Zama premiered it was also inexplicably put out of competition. Now her newest film (formerly Chocobar) has suffered the same fate. Obviously this would be the highest priority for my festival, but it’s likely too expensive. Anime does not have the greatest track record of cracking the competitions at the major festivals (unless you’re Miyazaki). Makoto Shinkai just did it for Suzume a couple of years ago, but names like Masaaki Yuasa or Naoko Yamada have been only sniffed sidebars or premiered at Annecy. In the case of Hosoda, I feel like it will happen eventually, but it’s hard to see him as a respected elder statesman. Anyway, if you swap The Smashing Machine with Scarlet things automatically look a little more interesting.

Orizzonti

Divine Comedy (Ali Asgari) / Hiedra (Ana Cristina Barragan) / Il rapimento di Arabella (Carolina Cavalli) / Strange River (Jaume Claret Muxart) / Lost Land (Akio Fujimoto) / Grand Ciel (Akihiro Hata) / Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin) / Late Fame (Kent Jones) / Milk Teeth (Mihai Mincan) / Pin de fartie (Alejo Moguillansky) / Father (Tereza Nvotová) / En el camino (David Pablos) / Songs of Forgotten Trees (Anuparna Roy) / Un anno di scuola (Laura Samani) / The Souffleur (Gastón Solnicki) / Barrio Triste (Stillz) / Mother (Teona Strugar Mitevska) / Human Resource (Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit) / Funeral Casino Blues (Roderick Warich)

If you’re at all aware of my work you should know that the biggest film here is the latest Alejo Moguillansky. Based on the cast list, this appears to be another family affair (Moguillansky, his daughter and wife are are all listed) with a mixture of El Pampero veterans such as Laura Paredes and Fernando Tur. El Pampero has gained a lot of prominence over the last six years or so after the premiere of La Flor and Trenque Lauquen. But in my more cynical days I think the press and acclaim has something to do with their epic lengths; they achieved a sort of notoriety from their extremeness. But how many have followed the micro-experiments of Llinás during the last five years? (Not me, I haven’t seen any of the seven films he has premiered since La Flor). I wonder if Moguillansky’s film will get a little lost in the shuffle without such epic lengths. We’ll see. In other Latin American news, I’m somewhat curious about Hiedra from Ana Cristina Barragan but also nervous (her previous short film which showed at Toronto seemed exactly like the type of film that would show at Toronto). I am suspicious of Solnicki (too many films in Europe) and I am extremely suspicious of whatever Barrio Triste is (an EDGLRD production). Two films that I’m interested in: Late Fame by Kent Jones and Human Resource by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, two filmmakers who have absolutely nothing to do with each other, all the better to smash them together.

Spotlight

Hijra (Shahad Ameen) / A Loose End (Daniel Hendler) / Made in EU (Stephan Komandarev) / Motor City (Potsy Ponciroli) / It Would Be Night in Caracas (Mariana Rondón, Marité Ugás) / Silent Rebellion (Marie-Elsa Sgualdo) / Calle Malaga (Maryam Touzani) / Ammazzare stanca (Daniele Vicari)

This section is apparently a re-branded Orizzonti Extra which now sort of makes it the Cannes Premiere of this festival, a section meant to hoover up world premieres and deny them to other festivals (like San Sebastian where Mariana Rondón’s previous film played last year). What makes this different from Orizzonti? I have no clue. Festival sections without a clear mandate are always amusing - they confuse everyone except the programmers (maybe even them). Perhaps it is easier to see whatever proposal the programming team is after by looking away from the competition (which fulfills its duty as a launching pad for award season prospects with grim determination) and look at the margins. But it does set the tone to a degree and it colors everything else, rendering the other sections as afterthoughts (to the press, at least). Take it from me - some of the absolute dreck that has premiered in the competition over the last few years (primarily English-language prestige productions) has definitely colored my perception of the rest, when there are very interesting films sitting right there that don’t have anything to do with this logic (such as Koji Fukada’s Love Life or the Italian films, which are in their own universe). And yet I paint it all with the same brush. See the issue.

Let’s stop here with the obvious caveat that if I ever traveled to Venice I would never step foot in a movie theater.

Text by Jhon Hernandez