Filmmaker Emma Dante was right when she said that breathing through masks made us aware of our fragility—not that we were sick, exactly, but not quite well either. For eleven days, the 77th Venice Film Festival became the first major in-person international event of the pandemic era. To ensure it could proceed safely, organizers implemented a vast system of health protocols, including mandatory masks during screenings and in some outdoor areas. Another significant change: all accredited visitors had to reserve their seats in advance. The system worked, though it created an unnecessarily cumbersome process for wheelchair users. All cinemas were accessible to people with disabilities, but those attendees had to email for seat reservations rather than simply clicking on a seating chart like everyone else.
The main novelty was the disappearance of the red carpet—hidden behind a barrier. The few stars present could not parade before the usual crowds of admirers. It was an edition with less glitter and fewer parties, far more focused on promoting the films themselves. Nomadland's victory felt a touch safe: a film beloved by international critics, yet it left some doubts about how deeply it engaged with the lives of the new nomads forced to travel across America in search of work. The integration between real people and professional actress Frances McDormand didn't always work.
Director Chloé Zhao won the Golden Lion in a year when women were notably more visible than usual. Looking across all sections of the festival, we noticed that other underrepresented categories also received more attention than in the past. This was especially true of Oaza, a Serbian film shot entirely inside an institution for people with mild intellectual disabilities. The residents themselves became actors, performing a complex romantic story—invented but entirely believable—with a sincerity only they could bring to their roles.
Equally powerful was Maisie Sky's performance in the award-winning Listen. A girl born to Portuguese immigrant parents in the UK breaks her hearing aid, which her parents cannot afford to replace. Mysterious bruises appear on her back. Social services move in. An anguishing battle begins between the parents—their three children taken away—and British bureaucracy incapable of providing the care the children need. Greta Thunberg, too, confronts the subject of Asperger's syndrome in the documentary Greta—a diagnosis often weaponized against her. For the Swedish teenager, whose activism her entire family experienced as a kind of therapy, Asperger's may actually have helped her see with clarity the urgency and importance of climate action.
In documentary filmmaking, Final Account stood out. Unlike so many other films about Nazi crimes, it interviews former Nazis who, though not in command positions, were nevertheless active—more or less willingly—parts of the machinery that led to the deaths of millions. If evil committed by ordinary people frightens us, how do we face evil perpetrated by those labeled "insane"? Dr. Lewis, interviewed in Crazy, Not Insane, has spent years studying death row cases in the United States. She has found that mental illness itself never creates a criminal. Rather, it is almost always the abuse and trauma of the past that transforms former victims into perpetrators. Gianfranco Rosi spent three years traveling to document today's Middle East in his beautiful Notturno. In Baghdad, he encountered a psychiatric hospital; he was barred from filming patients except those undergoing theater therapy. Their performances became the film's red thread, running through the entire story of the region.
Among works that best captured the fragility of childhood, the Iranian Khōrshīd introduced us to a school in Tehran that, using private funding, tries to give education and a future to street children forced to work from an early age. Topside is set in New York, though its protagonist, a girl, has never actually seen the city. She has always lived in the underground tunnels with her mother and will be forced, terrified, to discover what exists above ground when an eviction comes. A sweet Chinese girl is central to The Best is Yet to Come, which reconstructs a journalistic investigation that exposed the severe discrimination—at school and at work—faced by hepatitis B patients in China.
There were also powerful reflections on historical events. Quo vadis, Aida? brought us back, through a woman's eyes, to the massacre of innocents at Srebrenica in 1995. Russia, both Soviet and post-Soviet, was also present: the Theater Dubrovka massacre of 2002 appeared in Koferensyia, and especially in the new film by master director Konchalovsky, Dorogie tovarišči, which reconstructed the massacre of Novocherkassk in 1962.
One last film deserves mention: The Man Who Sold His Skin. It transforms the true story of a man who had an artwork tattooed on his back for museum exhibition into the fictional account of a Syrian refugee who cannot move to Europe as a human being but can do so as a living work of art. In a year when cinema poured into Venice but many people could not, perhaps this paradox might be a good omen for a future Venice Film Festival with broader participation—one that remains attentive to diverse themes and geographies.