Attending the Venice Film Festival means spending a few days outside reality, stepping into countless cinematic universes. In 2025, it proved harder than usual—the reality of wars and tragedies unfolding across the world pursued us even into the theaters. Many expected the jury to make different choices. It awarded the Silver Lion—the Grand Prize of the Jury, the festival's second-highest honor—to The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film about the Palestinian question. Yet it chose as the Golden Lion a small, intimate film about family relationships: Father Mother Sister Brother by Jim Jarmusch. Aware of this tension, Jarmusch himself reminded us that films not explicitly political can carry equal weight. "Art doesn't need to address politics directly in order to be political," he said. "It can generate empathy and connections between us, which is the first step toward solving problems." Here is the third installment of our selection, following the first and second parts already published.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Venice 82 Competition
On January 29, 2024, a five-year-old girl living in Gaza was the sole survivor in a car carrying six relatives when it was bombed by the Israeli army. She called for help, and her call was received by the Palestine Red Crescent, which attempted to coordinate a rescue operation from a distance. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania tells this story entirely from the perspective of the rescue workers. But the voice heard throughout the phone calls is the actual voice of Hind Rajab herself, recorded at that moment. This choice raises difficult moral questions: Is it acceptable to subject the film—and its viewers—to unbearable emotional weight by making them relive, in such realism, the nightmare of hearing an innocent child's voice calling for help for hours, unable to assist? The effect on those who saw it in Venice (where it won the Grand Prize of the Jury) was devastating. Yet it's important to acknowledge that this is a form of moral coercion, even if intentional and justified by the film's ultimate purpose. The film aims not only to commemorate one of countless tragedies in Gaza since October 2023. It seeks to make viewers experience in a new way—amplified by the cinema screen—the helplessness of knowing everything that is happening and being utterly unable to stop it. Stylistically, the film belongs to that genre of narratives told from the perspective of someone not present, relying only on secondhand accounts (like Gustav Möller's The Guilty from 2018, shot in a police call center). This approach works both because what is "unseen" cannot be shown without betraying it, and because the filmmaker conceived her reconstruction as a rupture between reality and fiction—making clear that the fiction serves to deepen our engagement with facts we must not forget. The fluid transition between her film's images and actual footage, occurring through a phone screen, breaks the suspension of disbelief like a necessary, salutary slap.
Agnus Dei
Biennale College Cinema
Two newborn lambs are brought into a monastery with great ceremony. A nun cares for them with deep affection, watching them grow day by day. Without knowing the full story, it reads as surreal. But Massimiliano Camaiti's documentary reveals a ritual repeated for centuries each year. Every January, two lambs arrive at the Monastery of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. The nuns tend them for several months, then use their wool to make palliums—sacred vestments—to be presented to the Pope. Biennale College films, funded directly by the Venice Biennale for its annual competition winners, operate on tight schedules and must be completed in just months. It happened that Camaiti filmed in 2025, the Holy Year—and more significantly, the year of Pope Francis's illness and death. This momentous event did not, however, alter the monastery's centuries-old rhythms. The nuns' deep sense of duty allows no surrender to grief. The lambs, wandering freely through the courtyards, are blithely indifferent to it all. The sisters have barely a moment's distraction from their established habits, which they have peacefully embraced for generations. Their palliums will reach Pope Leo XIV.
The Curfew
Horizons Short Films Competition
Ayaan moves in with his grandmother after she suffers a stroke and is still recovering. Communication is difficult—she speaks Urdu, he speaks English, and the stroke has left her with speech and comprehension challenges. He cannot make sense of her behavior. Why does she crawl out of the apartment at night, dragging herself across the hallway floor? Shehrezad Maher's short is a small meditation on how we react to the echoes of buried, unshared colonial memory—unknowable to younger generations.
Short Summer
Venice Days - Competition
Two boys stop a car carrying two elderly people and a child, staging a checkpoint. What kind of place is this, where children play at war and adults humor them without flinching? Chechnya is named only when the boys read a wanted poster; Chechnya surfaces occasionally in the news. Without explicit declarations, we catch countless small signs of a war that was—and perhaps will be again—of chronic proximity to conflict that becomes steadily clearer to us, and likely works on the unconscious level of the film's young protagonist as well. She will grow in an environment accustomed to perpetual tension. Nastia Korkia, a Russian-born director, won the Lion of the Future—Luigi De Laurentiis Award for best debut fiction.
Indietro così!
Venice Days - Notti Veneziane
Antonio Morabito's documentary follows Stefano Romani, a social worker who years ago, unable to sustain himself as a theater artist, began organizing theater workshops for people with psychiatric and physical disabilities through a cooperative. Now his commitment is so complete that he harbors no desire to play the artist. He doesn't simply imagine and direct performances; he also handles transportation, logistics, and—most importantly—conceives theater as an instrument of social integration and improved quality of life. He has an innate ability to attune himself to everyone, yet carries the fragility of someone who doesn't know how to value his own work. His enthusiasm erases the boundary between life and stage because for him the whole world seems to be a stage on which anyone he meets deserves to stand. On the stage of life he builds each day, everyone has the right to remain, to be seen, and to make their voice heard.
OFFICIAL AWARDS - 82nd Venice International Film Festival
The Jury of Venice 82, chaired by Alexander Payne and composed of Stéphane Brizé, Maura Delpero, Cristian Mungiu, Mohammad Rasoulof, Fernanda Torres, and Zhao Tao, after viewing the 21 films in competition, has decided to award the following prizes:
GOLDEN LION for best film to: FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER by Jim Jarmusch (USA, Ireland, France)
SILVER LION – GRAND JURY PRIZE to: THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB by Kaouther Ben Hania (Tunisia, France)
SILVER LION – BEST DIRECTOR to: Benny Safdie for THE SMASHING MACHINE (USA)
VOLPI CUP for best female performance to: Xin Zhilei
in RI GUA ZHONG TIAN (THE SUN RISES ON US ALL) by Cai Shangjun (China)
VOLPI CUP for best male performance to: Toni Servillo in LA GRAZIA by Paolo Sorrentino (Italy)
BEST SCREENPLAY to: Valérie Donzelli and Gilles Marchand for À PIED D'OEUVRE by Valérie Donzelli (France)
SPECIAL JURY PRIZE to: SOTTO LE NUVOLE by Gianfranco Rosi (Italy)
MARCELLO MASTROIANNI AWARD to an emerging young actor or actress: Luna Wedler in SILENT FRIEND by Ildikó Enyedi (Germany, Hungary, France)
HORIZONS
The HORIZONS Jury of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, chaired by Julia Ducournau and composed of Yuri Ancarani, Fernando Enrique Juan Lima, Shannon Murphy, and RaMell Ross, after viewing the 19 feature films and 14 short films in competition, awards:
BEST HORIZONS FILM to: EN EL CAMINO (ON THE ROAD) by David Pablos (Mexico)
BEST HORIZONS DIRECTOR to: Anuparna Roy for SONGS OF FORGOTTEN TREES (India)
HORIZONS SPECIAL JURY PRIZE to: HARÀ WATAN (LOST LAND) by Akio Fujimoto (Japan, France, Malaysia, Germany)
BEST HORIZONS ACTRESS to: Benedetta Porcaroli in IL RAPIMENTO DI ARABELLA by Carolina Cavalli (Italy)
BEST HORIZONS ACTOR to: Giacomo Covi in UN ANNO DI SCUOLA by Laura Samani (Italy, France)
BEST HORIZONS SCREENPLAY to: Ana Cristina Barragán for HIEDRA (THE IVY) (Ecuador)
BEST HORIZONS SHORT FILM to: UTAN KELLY (WITHOUT KELLY) by Lovisa Sirén (Sweden)
LION OF THE FUTURE – LUIGI DE LAURENTIIS AWARD FOR BEST DEBUT FEATURE
The LION OF THE FUTURE – LUIGI DE LAURENTIIS AWARD Jury of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, chaired by Charlotte Wells and composed of Erige Sehiri and Silvio Soldini, awards the
LION OF THE FUTURE – LUIGI DE LAURENTIIS AWARD to:
SHORT SUMMER by Nastia Korkia (Germany, France, Serbia)
VENICE DAYS – ARMANI BEAUTY AUDIENCE AWARD:
CALLE MÁLAGA by Maryam Touzani (Morocco, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium)
VENICE CLASSICS
The VENICE CLASSICS Jury chaired by Tommaso Santambrogio and composed of 23 students—selected by faculty—from Italian university film programs, awards the
BEST DOCUMENTARY ON CINEMA to:
MATA HARI by Joe Beshenkovsky and James A. Smith (USA)
and the BEST RESTORED FILM to:
BASHU, GHARIBEYE KOOCHAK (BASHU, THE LITTLE STRANGER) by Bahram Beyzaie (Iran, 1985)
VENICE IMMERSIVE
The VENICE IMMERSIVE Jury chaired by Eliza McNitt and composed of Gwenael François and Boris Labbé, after viewing the 30 projects in competition, awards the
VENICE IMMERSIVE GRAND PRIZE to:
THE CLOUDS ARE TWO THOUSAND METERS UP by Singing Chen (Taipei, Germany)
the VENICE IMMERSIVE SPECIAL JURY PRIZE to:
LESS THAN 5GR OF SAFFRON by Négar Motevalymeidanshah (France)
and the VENICE IMMERSIVE AWARD FOR ACHIEVEMENT to:
A LONG GOODBYE by Kate Voet and Victor Maes (Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands)
GOLDEN LION FOR CAREER ACHIEVEMENT 2025 to: KIM NOVAK WERNER HERZOG
CARTIER GLORY TO THE FILMMAKER AWARD 2025 to: JULIAN SCHNABEL
CAMPARI PASSION FOR FILM AWARD 2025 to:
GUS VAN SANT