Introduction to the Venice Film Festival
The Venice Film Festival this year offered films that wrestled with the most urgent political and social issues of our time – from war in the Middle East to the increasing threat from AI – and found a way to make existential despair. Dystopia has never looked so good.
Laugh over the Apocalypse
Two of the films with the most bleak messages for humanity were also the funniest. "Bugonia", from Yorgos Lanthimos, director of "Poor Things", throws Emma Stone as a powerful CEO, who is kidnapped by two conspiracy theorists, convinced that she is a foreigner to destroy the planet Earth. "Bugonia" is a crazy black comedy with sci-fi and paranoid thriller elements that reflect on the obvious inability of mankind that we all see.
"Humanity is about to be settled very soon. People have to choose the right way, otherwise I don’t know how much time [we have] left," said Lanthimos in Venice.
No Other Choice
"No other choice", the new film by the South Korean director Park Chan-Wook ("Oldboy", "The Handmaiden"), wrings also comedy from the bleak realities of our post-industrial capitalist world. In his history of a hard-working family man, the satirical thriller channeled Alfred Hitchcock to desperate measures. Man-Su (played by "Squid Game" star Lee Byung-Hun) has been a committed employee in a paper mill for 25 years before taking over a company on the street. In danger of losing his house and hard-working identity as a nutrient, he decides that he has "no other choice" than to eliminate the competition for a new job.
Netflix Serves Disasters
When Lanthimos and Park comedy found chaos, Netflix leaned into a disaster. The streamer set a new record with three competition stations at the Venice Film Festival. In addition to the unforgettable "Jay Kelly" with George Clooney as George Clooney star, which we are supposed to be sorry-Netflix two darker dramas, "A House of Dynamit" and "Frankenstein", both in Dread and Dystopia. "A House of Dynamite" is a real-time thriller in the White House because a nuclear rocket is introduced in the USA. Nobody knows who did it. Military and civilian leaders strive to make impossible decisions about who saved and how they should react.
Frankenstein
The other Netflix play was "Frankenstein", a new adaptation of the classic monster film by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro ("Pan’s Labyrinth"). With the Oscar Issac as a doctor Victor Frankenstein and an up-and-coming Star Jakob Elordi as a creature, the Elordi from Hollywood Hottie should bring to a dramatic star of the A-List-the film remains loyal to the Gothic Victorian roots of the original history of Mary Shely and finds a way to clean the Told Lale. "Frankenstein" questions the pursuit of technological progress in the expense of humanity and asks whether the dispute is defined by appearance or acting.
The Voice of a Child from Gaza
But the most powerful film in Venice this year may be one of the little ones. "The Voice of Hind Rajab" from the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania tells the story of a six-year-old girl who is trapped in a car in Gaza after Israeli tank fire killed her family. Hind remained on the line for more than an hour with emergency distributors and advocated being saved. The ambulance to reach them was destroyed and the two doctors were killed on board. Ben Hania using the actual recordings of Hinds Call – fragments that spread online and later confirmed by international media – brings us to their last moments. In doing so, she cuts through the dehuman statistics of victims and civilian deaths in Gaza to give us the voice of a single child who asks for help. The film received 23 minutes of ovation after showing Venice on Wednesday evening.
"From a personal point of view, I only felt like I was doing something, so I wasn’t complicit," said Ben Hania. "I have no political power. I am not an activist. All I have is this one tool that I mastered a bit – cinema. At least I was not silenced with this film."
With "The Voice of Hind Rajab", Ben Hania delivers the most urgent film of the 2025 Film Festival, one that refuses to look away from the real horror of our world, with a child of a child who still echoes long after the darkness of the screen.
