VENICE 2025

Dissent around the jury’s Golden Lion pick only slightly dimmed one of Venice’s best film festivals in years.

Rare is the film able to turn a meditation on time, nature, neuroscience and interspecies connections into a memorable, stirring adventure of ideas like Ildiko Enyedi’s ‘Silent Friend’, a totally original, time-spanning story that closed Venice competition with a bang.

Loaded with previously unseen archive footage, Robert Gordon’s engaging documentary ‘Newport & the Great Folk Dream’ looks beyond star names like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to explore the musical, social and political roots of Newport Folk Festival.

The independent filmmakers section reaches its 22nd edition.

An illuminating, soul-deep portrait of the great Italian stage actress Eleanora Duse, gloriously played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, is interwoven with the rise of Fascism in Italy following the First World War.

A tremendously moving reenactment of a real tragedy that took place in Gaza, Kaouther Ben Hania’s ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ masterfully integrates fiction and reality in a grief-stricken lament for a child in mortal danger.

Filmed in Kenya, Damien Hauser’s wildly inventive retro-futuristic fairy tale ‘Memory of Princess Mumbi’ combines dazzling AI visuals with bittersweet meditations on love and loss, cinematic fantasy and human reality.

Acclaimed artists and filmmakers Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani (‘Radiograph of a Family’) pool their talents in ‘Past Present Continuous’, an emotionally-charged yet formally distanced creative documentary that combines experiences of Iranians in exile from their country.

Russian history whips by onscreen in Olivier Assayas’s often fascinating, at times clumsy English-language drama ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin,’ detailing the rise of Putin (Jude Law) and authoritarian power through the eyes of a brilliant, unscrupulous young ideologue.

British writer-director Mark Jenkin’s visually inventive maritime mystery ‘Rose of Nevada’ hits a few choppy waters but ultimately proves to be a haunting meditation on grief, guilt and collective trauma.

Digging deep into Naples’ past, Italy’s premier documentarian Gianfranco Rosi (‘Sacro GRA’; ‘Notturno’) struggles to turn the city into a metaphor for time, history, and the human condition in ‘Below the Clouds’.

Libyan-American director Jihan K mourns both her lost father and her lost fatherland in her moving, lyrical, densely layered murder-mystery docu-memoir ‘My Father and Qadaffi’.

Three women’s journey to Mecca becomes a stunning allegory on life for a 12-year-old girl in Saudi director Shahad Ameen’s (‘Scales’) bewitching road movie, ‘Hijra’.

Noomi Rapace and director Teona Strugar Mitevska give young Mother Teresa a lightly feminist “punk” remix, but sadly their non-committal bio-drama ‘Mother’ is not ‘The Girl with the Jesus Tattoo’.