Venice 82: Voices from the Past, Films That Shape the Future

Here's the second selection of films from Venice 82 (see the first part here). Rain or shine, outside the Cinema Palace at the Lido, autograph hunters and selfie seekers camp for hours or even days. The films themselves draw a different crowd—one that fills the theaters. For paying audiences and accredited guests alike, the choice is overwhelming: films on every subject imaginable. Communist dictatorships. Colonialism. Biographies of historical figures. The Film Festival always offers a bracing refresher course in history.

Orphan

Hungarian director László Nemes drew on his father's biography to craft a story that begins during World War II and continues into the years following the Soviet suppression of Hungary's 1956 uprising. A boy born during the war, convinced his Jewish father was interned by the Nazis and hoping for his return after more than a decade, discovers his mother has lied to him when another man claims to be his real father. The family thriller—the supposed father, even in his attempts at tenderness, is an imposing, menacing figure who repels the boy—unfolds against a climate of fear and mistrust in a nation forcibly subjugated by a foreign power. Forced acceptance of reality as it is, when the hunger for change meets only frustration, drives the story toward anguished but inescapable shadows, both outward and within.

Mother

No one expected a hagiography of Mother Teresa from her fellow Macedonian Teona Strugar Mitevska—nor a pure work of fiction from a director who had made a documentary about her years earlier and woven much of what she learned from those interviewed into this narrative. Mother focuses on a single crucial week in 1948, when Mother Teresa (Noomi Rapace) awaited Vatican approval to found her religious order. She faces a crisis when she discovers her most trusted sister is pregnant. The director has not confirmed this as historical fact, but it serves to illuminate the ideas Mother Teresa held with such conviction, while also exploring her doubts: rigid about women's duties and the mandate to help the weak and defenseless, yet finding in that very intransigence the foundation of her moral strength.

Dinții de lapte (Milk Teeth)

Romania, April 1989: a child vanishes. A mother refuses to accept the communist police investigation. A resigned father. A sister forced to continue her childhood while carrying the weight of absence. In the final days of a regime so oppressive it consumed every corner of Romanian life, this small family tragedy, directed by Mihai Mincan, returns us to the intimate dimension of waiting for change that never seems to arrive—and the fear that the horrors of the past cannot truly be left behind.

Nuestra tierra

Lucrecia Martel spent years making a documentary about Javier Chocobar, a member of the Chuschagasta indigenous community in northern Argentina, killed in a violent confrontation with a group of white men claiming ownership of lands the indigenous people had long claimed as their own. The footage of the trial is only the starting point. What follows is a passionate exploration of the community's relationship to its history and its land—roots far deeper than the expropriations carried out by European conquistadors. A people's memory holds more power than laws imposed by force. This is a film that attempts to rewrite the unresolved historical wrong of colonialism with greater justice.

Boomerang Atomic

Franco-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb has assembled archival materials documenting France's atomic tests conducted across its North African colonies during the 1960s, particularly in the Algerian Sahara. The footage reveals total indifference toward those territories and their inhabitants (despite false claims that none existed), all in the supposed greater interest of France. These tests were not painless, and indigenous populations still pay the price—visible in the film's final scenes. It is brilliant strategy: to use the colonizers' own words and images to expose the hypocrisy of those who wielded their power against people they deemed inferior and unworthy of concern.