The Venice Film Festival Warns of a World on the Brink

This year’s Venice Film Festival was overshadowed by a movie that wasn’t there. In June, the billionaire Jeff Bezos announced through back channels that his film studio, Amazon MGM, would no longer be releasing Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s contentious biopic of OpenAI founder and billionaire Sam Altman. Four months earlier, Amazon had signed a $50 billion strategic partnership with OpenAI. As Amazon’s $75 million documentary Melania (over a third of which went directly to the First Lady herself) made obvious, Bezos has no qualms using his Hollywood studio as a tool to bribe or do business with fellow billionaires. Artificial was picked up by Neon a few weeks later with the news that it “will compete in this year’s Oscar race.” Insiders pointed to Venice, Guadagnino’s favorite festival, as the launch point.

“Cinema is capturing the invisible through the means of the visible,” Guadagnino declared, at a masterclass in Venice on September 7. He was there to receive the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award, as well as to premiere his seven-and-a-half hour documentary, Joie de vivre, about the late filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. For whatever reason, Neon had chosen to delay the release of his latest cinematic thriller by a month, where it will be received as part of the non-competitive New York Film Festival. But Venice turns out not to have needed it, independently delivering an official selection chock-full of class commentary and billionaire critique. The 83rd edition of the film festival was a global survey of how extreme wealth inequality has changed the ways we live now, both as citizens and immigrants. 

A major facet of this survey was an examination of how so much extreme wealth has been built in the first place: by grabbing and holding the attention of others. The festival opened with Ink, the story of one immigrant—Australian Rupert Murdoch—finding success in 1970s London as he pushes to make his recently purchased broadside, The Sun, the world’s best-selling newspaper. The details are fascinating, focusing on the abominable ethics of Murdoch’s editor Larry Lamb, who chases ambulances, foments violence and even pastes porn into the paper to keep his readers hooked. But the overall arc of this story is well-known, and director Danny Boyle spelled it out blatantly with a closing montage that included documentary footage of modern attentional overlords like Elon Musk and Donald Trump: The high-jacking of media for profit produces monsters. Just look at the world we’re living in.

The need to affirm and record this fact, rather than picture alternatives, seemed to be the primary theme of this year’s festival—a fact made evident by Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour documentary Musk, which compiled everything that’s known about the world’s first trillionaire without breaking new ground. In the realm of fiction, Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime affirmed the power of mass media to unleash an audience’s worst instincts when deployed cynically—in this case by Chris Hansen (played by Robert Pattison), a television host driven by his own need for attention. As a slimy story about broadcast in the early 2000s, it makes for a fitting sequel to Ink. 

Meanwhile, Floran Zeller’s Bunker unfurled the closest thing to a fable of billionaire resistance, as architect Miguel Moreno (played by Javier Bardem) battles his own attraction to the exclusionary power extreme wealth can buy. Asked by a shadowy billionaire (Paul Dano) to design a bunker for his remote Hawaiian property, Miguel fantasizes about his own ability to shut the world out around him to such a degree, ensuring the security of his family with indifference to others. His wife Sofia (Penelope Cruz), aghast that he might work for “the genius who built the app your daughter is addicted to,” begins to wonder if the husband before her is still the person she married. Zeller’s film is heavy-handed but valuable as a portrait of bourgeois anxieties in an age of extreme inequality: Visibly better off than most of their neighbors, the Morenos still lack the means to fully close themselves off from the world, while finding themselves practically at the mercy of someone several hundred times richer than them. As Dano’s character explains in a skin-crawling monologue to justify his ‘prepper’ project, its main purposes would be to protect him from societal revolt: “There’s too much money at the top of the pyramid.”

The lives of the many living at the bottom of this pyramid was explored across several excellent documentaries, though all of them focused on labor relations within the United States alone. Luke Lorentzen’s Boatbuilders was the most optimistic of the bunch. Shot on the shores of Brooklin, Maine (a town with at least as many watercraft as people), it follows the crew of a boat yard as they patiently convert a pile of lumber into a 50-foot yacht. Rich in material detail and emphasizing the supportive rapport amongst the workers, Lorentzen’s film is heartwarming and almost meditative. Gradually, though, details about the unsustainable nature of the industry bleed through: Tariffs are making it harder to buy parts. The price of bronze keeps doubling. The crew of the Brooklin Boat Yard spend over a year working on a single boat, only to be told by their client (a financial advisor from California) that their hard work amounts to a “frivolous investment” for him. The kind of artisanal craftsmanship seen in Boatbuilders is increasingly rare in the United States and overdeveloped nations like it, where the livelihoods of many are increasingly dependent on the whims of very few. 

Elsewhere, several films in Venice’s official selection explored the fraught relationship between technology and attention—the two primary products bought and sold by the billionaire class—as tools of political subjugation. Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rach Szor’s bone-chilling survey of nearly two dozen Israeli intelligence operatives, reveals the extent to which technology deadens empathy. Multiple subjects describe the sophistication of surveillance tools deployed during the Siege of Gaza in 2023, which allowed them to tap any phone in Gaza to see and hear into the family homes they were preparing to bomb. Yet these same individuals lack the ability to fully grasp the fact that they are responsible for ending hundreds or thousands of lives—overwhelmingly those of women and children. The conveniences of technology, especially AI, are used here as a kind of prism to separate the individual from the job they were tasked with. The military term “NAZA” plays an important role in this obfuscation, turning the family members that surround a targeted individual into a simple tally of collateral damage. One operative states that the benchmark of acceptability for strikes against low-ranking members of Hamas was a NAZA of 20 (meaning, 20 other casualties for each verified target). For high-ranking members, the NAZA could be as high as 500. Abraham and Szor’s documentary is eerily quiet as it describes the twisted logic that led to the slaughter of thousands: Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the darkness obscures the identity of its subjects while simultaneously allowing the camera to occasionally trail off. Naza peers into the lit windows of ordinary Israeli homes while whistleblowers describe the strategic destruction of identical buildings a mere 60 km away. 

A similar level of surveillance and indifference to human life is obsessively reenacted in the epic production of DAU, the result of a multi-decade project by director Ilya Khrzhanovsky to recreate the conditions of Soviet life as epic theater. In 2006, Khrzhanovsky set out to make a film based on the life of Soviet physicist Lev Landau, but his desire to get the background details as precise as possible grew into an immersive set lived on by over 400 extras. Allegations of abuse attest that the director was so obsessive about recreating a totalitarian state that he encouraged all participants to spy on one another, reporting their gossip to a Stasi-like internal team. While the life of the Landau-inspired protagonist slips in and out of focus in Dau, this level of terrified attention is felt across every inch of the film, as paranoia from the on-set environment seeps into the performances and the Orwellian mise-en-scene. The tone of this fraught film is surreal, locked in a version of the Soviet past in which masses scurry by like ants beneath a magnifying glass.

Continuing the exploration of labor in an era of mass surveillance, the legendary labor documentarian Barbara Kopple returned with Union Town, her third film documenting worker strikes across America. Here, Kopple focuses on New York City and its most marginalized laborers: package distributors and food delivery drivers. Frequently risking significant injury riding the streets of the city on electric bikes or last-mile delivery vehicles, these workers are often paid less than minimum wage. Companies like DoorDash and Bezos’s Amazon strategically chop their delivery needs up via independent contractors, closely monitoring the performance of workers while keeping them from the benefits of full-time employment. With UPS’s 2023 historic contract negotiation with the Teamsters serving as a foil narrative about old-school union power, Kopple reveals just how far the state of modern labor relations has fallen. Despite multiple distribution warehouses overwhelmingly voting to join the Teamsters, Amazon refuses to acknowledge the union. Closing with a clip of UPS CEO Carol Tomé cackling over a video of a humanoid robot labeling and distributing packages, the film offered a bleak portrait of economic life in the years to come.

The United States depends on cheap immigrant labor to perform its lowliest tasks while strategically denying them the rights and security to advocate for themselves. This bleak state of affairs became painfully clear when pairing Kopple’s Union Town with Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller’s gripping documentary short They’re Here. Poitras and Mueller’s film goes inside the chaos of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s “Operation Metro Surge,” in which masked agents descended on the Twin Cities of Minnesota last winter, abducting undocumented immigrants. In one vignette, the camera rides with an undocumented man in the trunk of a car, a condition he has to brave in sub-zero weather in order to continue working. “Without work, there is nothing,” he avers from inside the darkened compartment. Pushing its camera into the center of altercations with local protesters and surveilling the ICE deportation planes, They’re Here jarringly evokes historical images of fascism and makes the case that such conditions exist now in America.

This threat of totalitarian pressure deployed as violence in the street found its fullest expression in Woman Unknown, the film which won this year’s Golden Lion for Best Film, as well as the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for the film’s lead, Mathilde Arcel. She plays Marie, a housemaid in Denmark immediately following World War II, who struggles to hide her ties to members of the former Nazi regime as she prepares to marry her employer. In a brilliant portrait of dissociation and dread, the film follows Marie through a series of menial tasks that serve to strategically obscure her past, portraying the maintenance of political conformity as something akin to a household chore. As a period piece, the film feels distant from our own times, but it’s still haunting as a cautionary tale of lost liberties. Across its portrayals of the present and past, the 83rd Venice Film Festival collectively pictured a world on the brink, one where entrenched imbalances of power threaten to strip away the virtues of a rights-based global order.