Last year's 77th Venice Film Festival was unique but not unrepeatable. Venice 78 brought back the same health protocols as before: temperature checks, distancing, masks in theaters, a wall blocking the red carpet from view, and mandatory vaccine passes. It worked again—only three cases of infection. Everything ran smoothly on the organizational and health fronts. This time, the films rightly took center stage.
Festival director Alberto Barbera hoped to identify a unifying theme in the official selection, announcing that many works would explore the condition of women. Instead, motherhood emerged as the central preoccupation—beginning with the opening film, Madres Paralelas by Pedro Almodóvar. Two mothers give birth the same day in the same hospital, and from that moment their lives become inextricably bound. Penélope Cruz plays one of them and won the prize for best actress. Almodóvar meditates on the importance of blood ties and the equally powerful affection one can feel for someone with whom you share no genetic bond.
L'Événement by Audrey Diwan also centers on motherhood—though rejected. Its protagonist is a French college student in the 1960s who becomes pregnant by accident and is determined not to have a child at this stage of her life. The film won the Golden Lion, surprising many who had predicted victory for Paolo Sorrentino's autobiographical film È stata la mano di Dio (a famous Maradona quote), where much of the protagonist's coming-of-age story revolves around his relationship with his parents, played by Teresa Saponangelo and Toni Servillo.
The protagonist of The Lost Daughter, adapted by Maggie Gyllenhaal from an Elena Ferrante novel, is also a mother—winning the prize for best screenplay. The film tells the story of a middle-aged woman on holiday in Greece who, watching a young mother with her daughter, reflects on her own tender and tormented relationship as the mother of two girls. A mother who suffers appears too in the figure of Barbara Sadowska, a Polish poet whose adolescent son is brutally beaten for no reason by communist police. Leave no Traces (directed by Jan P. Matuszynski) is set in Poland during the 1980s, when the government was working to rehabilitate its international image, even accepting a second official visit from Pope John Paul II. The regime wants to cover up its abuses, but the boy's mother and his best friend resist fiercely.
The Horizons section also featured memorable mothers. There is Vera in Vera Andrron Detin (directed by Kaltrina Krasniqi), fighting to claim her daughter's inheritance—a task nearly impossible in patriarchal Kosovo. Vera herself learned her most important inheritance from her deaf mother, who taught her sign language and enabled her to work as an interpreter. Julie, another mother, works and raises two children alone, battling daily commutes to Paris (À Plein Temps). In Cenzorka, 107 mothers raise their children inside an Odessa prison, living in fear they may lose them. Finally, there is Pin-Wen, who cares for her daughter at home during quarantine—a daughter who soon develops psychosis and must be cared for by her mother in turn, in a moving reversal of roles (Pubu).
Fatherhood found its place too. Un Autre Monde features Vincent Lindon in Stéphane Brizé's third film about the world of work. Lindon plays the director of a French factory for an American multinational: he earns good money but is tormented by orders from above to fire some of his employees. His work problems have destroyed his family's harmony, his wife has asked for a divorce, and his son's health has suffered—the boy left school and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. In his earlier films, Brizé focused on those losing or about to lose their jobs. Here he shows that money and power offer no guarantee of peace, in an increasingly inhuman free market that forces people to neglect their families.
In La Caja by Lorenzo Vigas, a boy travels to dangerous northern Mexico to collect the remains of his father, found in a mass grave. He meets a man who resembles the father he hasn't seen in years and draws close to him, hoping the remains in the casket belong to someone else. After initial wariness, a bond forms between them. But these zones controlled by organized crime threaten to spoil the boy's joy at having possibly found his father.
Freaks Out by Gabriele Mainetti also deserves attention—a rare example of an Italian fantasy film with international production ambitions. In Rome under Nazi occupation after the September 8, 1943 armistice, a small group of circus performers with special powers are led by Israel, a Jewish man. Among them: a hairy, powerfully built werewolf; an albino boy who can control insects; a dwarf who attracts metal; and a girl who emits electricity and cannot be touched. They are different in appearance or ability, convinced they can live only in a circus because they've learned there's no other place for them. But perhaps they simply need to find a purpose to feel useful. Against them, Mainetti sets a band of war-mutilated partisans. They too have become different, but they have already found their purpose—the struggle for freedom against fascism—and it drives them forward.
At a festival that awarded prizes in virtual reality for a work attempting to illustrate schizophrenia (Goliath: playing with reality) and in Horizons Extra for a film starring a blind actor (The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic), the international press praised the decision to show English subtitles during screenings of English-language films—a practice previously absent (only Italian subtitles were shown). A small but meaningful step toward making these major events accessible to an ever-larger and more diverse public.