Who’s Afraid of Film Festivals? After Politics Rattled Berlin and Shook Up Cannes, Venice Braces for Impact

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. “AI is here,” she said, “and so to fight it is to fight something that is a battle that we will lose.” Her statements created a firestorm on the internet.

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. “They are pulling $2.3 million in funding from the Biennale while also giving [Vladimir] Putin $5.9 billion [in liquefied natural gas contracts] in six months,” he said. 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. “If we had received a good submission from Russia, the only criteria we would have applied is the quality of the film,” he says. 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.

“[‘Musk’] is explosive in the way it was constructed and in the way it reframes its subject,” says Kent Sanderson, CEO of the film’s U.S. distributor, Bleecker Street, noting the four-hour film contains “real revelations that people will most certainly take note of.” 

Then there are Iranian director Ali Asgari’s drama “A Bit of Light,” about a dissident doctor arrested in Tehran, and Palestinian director Ahmed Hassouna’s “Citizen Osama,” which portrays a photographer trying to juggle roles as father and journalist while capturing the harrowing realities of war in Gaza. 

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. 

 Israel continues to be a controversial subject on the festival circuit. Israeli director Amos Gitai, who is known for works exploring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from both sides, says he’s grateful to be included in Venice in a year when Cannes featured no films flying the Israeli flag. “We are very moved when the decision was taken immediately and without hesitation,” he says. 

Gitai will bow “The Road to Jericho,” which revisits the legacy of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Jewish extremist after signing the historic Oslo Accords.

“Naza,” a new hot-button documentary from “No Other Land” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor was added on Monday to the Venice competition lineup. Expect it to spark up some political heat.

The doc, which was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, shows “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” according to its official synopsis.

As with most festivals, the majority of the movies bowing in Venice don’t deal directly with politics. Yet even for those titles, there is the risk that “politics can start to overshadow the film,” says Jonathan Rutter, who heads U.K. firm Premier Public Relations. “The problem is that the media these days is increasingly about sound bites and headlines.” He adds, “It’s slightly lazy journalism sometimes to pump actors and directors with prickly political sound bites for clickbait.”  

Italian distributor Andrea Romero agrees. His I Wonder Pictures banner is coming to the Lido with five films to launch, including the buzzy thriller “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson. “It’s important that talent take a political position when they have the right words and competence,” he says. However, “it’s civil and responsible that actors or directors refuse to make public statements about things about which they don’t feel competent or verbally at ease.” 

Last year, Venice jury president Alexander Payne, when asked about his stance on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, answered, “Quite frankly, I feel a little bit unprepared for that question. I’m here to judge and talk about cinema.” 

Payne didn’t receive much backlash at the fest’s outset, but as it came to a close, he faced a fusillade of politically charged questions from journalists incensed about the jury’s decision to award the Golden Lion to Jim Jarmusch’s family drama “Father Mother Sister Brother” instead of Kaouther Ben Hania’s Gaza-set “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” That film, which won the Silver Lion, was considered a shoo-in for the festival’s top award after its 22-minute standing ovation, which stands as the fest’s longest. “As a jury, we treasure both of those films equally, each for its own reason,” Payne responded. He was slammed by Italy’s Il Sole 24 Ore for “the lack of courage to award a Lion for Gaza,” as the daily’s headline read.

While Berlin’s Tuttle teetered on the verge of being fired by the German government, which funds 40% of the event, Barbera came out of last year’s political polemics on the Lido unscathed. “The festival, like all Biennale events, is a space open to dialogue and discussion between artists and creatives and not influenced by politics,” he says.

Venice is also likely to elicit strong feelings in the debate over AI. In a first among the world’s top film fests, the Venice selection features a movie made entirely with artificial intelligence: “Be Brave” is a 90-minute portrait of Renzo Rosso, founder of the Diesel fashion brand, directed by Francesco Carrozzini.

“I want to put this [film] forward as an invitation for everyone to think about how AI as a tool can open up new creative possibilities for filmmakers,” Barbera said when announcing its inclusion in the festival. It’s a simple yet provocative statement given the heated debate around AI. “It’s the role of festivals today to tackle this topic, going beyond the prejudices that seem to dominate the conversation.”