Lessons in Empathy at the Venice Film Festival

OPINION: In Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet, a Japanese anime that premiered in the second week of the Venice Film Festival, the titular heroine finds herself in the Otherworld, an arid, war-torn bardo for souls who are too caught up in conflict to enter Eternity. There, she is confronted by a little girl who wanders with her hijab-clad mother through the wreckage. “You’re a princess aren’t you?” the girl asks Scarlet brightly. “If I were a princess, I would grow up to make the world a place where children like me can no longer be killed.” 

In Chien 51, a Netflix-borne sci-fi thriller that served as the festival’s out-of-competition closer, a dystopian Paris has been divided into zones A, B, and C, not unlike the occupied West Bank. The passage between each is tightly enforced by lethal, AI-powered quadcopter drones, similar to the kind used today on civilians in Gaza. Full of ragpicking scavengers and a shadowy resistance movement, the edges of the French metropole in this speculative future come to resemble land around Jerusalem in our interminable present. 

It’s hard to watch these films without thinking about Palestine. Indeed, if the various speeches made during the Festival’s closing ceremony on Saturday, September 6th were any indication, this is a subject weighing heavily on the minds of nearly every filmmaker working today. Begging the question: Has the catastrophe in Gaza changed the way we tell stories now? As Israel’s military conquest approaches the end of its second year, an ethnic cleansing documented in real time by its victims, it seems to dismember once-reliable concepts like good and evil, heroes and villains, justice and truth. The agony it provokes, and the solidarity it engenders, have increasingly become part of our global cultural landscape – an attempt at moral reckoning in lieu of a political solution.

It makes sense, then, that the most powerful film of the festival is also the most direct confrontation with this subject. The Voice of Hind Rajab,  made by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, took home the festival’s Grand Jury Prize on Saturday (equivalent to second place). The film audaciously blends documentary and dramatic reenactment to tell the story of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl who was killed by the Israeli military last January, from the perspective of the humanitarians who tried to save her life. Taking place over a single day, and set entirely within the Palestine Red Crescent’s emergency call center in Ramallah, the film employs four Palestinian actors to portray the aid workers who intercepted Hind’s call for help after her aunt, uncle and cousins were killed while attempting to flee a military operation in Gaza City. Trapped in a car with their dead bodies, Hind repeatedly begs the Red Crescent operators to come rescue her. An ambulance from their fleet is mere blocks from her location, but securing a safe route requires hours of bureaucratic wrangling. As day wanes toward night, the operators keep Hind on the phone and attempt to calm her down, eventually receiving the military’s approval to start the rescue process, only for the line to go dead shortly after.

Hind’s story made international news as it was unfolding, after the Red Crescent Society, unable to verify what had happened to her or their rescue team, shared portions of the recorded phone call on social media. Ben Hania later received the complete audio file of the call from the Red Crescent, almost all of which is included in her film. While the movie is visually populated with actors, the voice they respond to is that of Hind Rajab herself. In one especially astounding sequence, Ben Hania also layers video footage of the real aid workers over her reenacted scenes, emphasizing a verisimilitude so seamless it’s almost uncanny. The film’s foregrounding of these social media artifacts emphasizes one of the significant themes of this year’s festival – the ways in which a still-unfolding crisis can become a packaged narrative before it is resolved or even understood by those experiencing it. 

In the acceptance speeches made during Venice’s awards ceremony, nearly every filmmaker brought up the tragedy in Gaza in one form or another, and a particular refrain was the agony of watching children suffer. Their outcries were woven into the otherwise serene progression of the glamorous event, alternately praising the festival for its commitment to sensitive subjects and calling attention to the incongruities of celebrating amidst catastrophe. “Cinema cannot bring Hind back. Nor can it erase the atrocity committed against her,” Ben Hania acknowledged in her acceptance of the jury prize, noting that Rajab’s mother and brother, who were featured in the film, “remain in danger, as do the lives of countless mothers, fathers and children.” But despite the urgency of these outcries and the presence of red carpet protesters, festival business continued largely as usual. 

A sense of the uneasiness between art and politics in Venice was evident in the often notable discomfort of jury president Alexander Payne, who confessed himself “unprepared” to discuss Gaza at the start of the festival, noting, “My political views, I’m sure, are in agreement with many of yours, but as far as my relationship with the festival and what the industry does, I have to think about that.” In the end, Payne’s jury chose Jim Jarmusch’s contemplative Father Mother Sister Brother for the Golden Lion, a film about the necessary tedium of spending time with one’s family. If this choice was meant to reinforce the power of art for art’s sake, it was deflated by the fact that The Voice of Hind Rajab has been universally acclaimed as an artistic triumph (it received the longest standing ovation in Venice’s history) while Jarmusch’s sleepy picture was variously dismissed and ridiculed by many early viewers. In the days leading up to the ceremony, rumors spread that at least one member of the jury threatened to quit over Payne’s refusal to award the Golden Lion to Ben Hania. 

Father Mother Sister Brother is not a meritless film. It has a stellar cast, for one (Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, and Luka Sabbat all costar, in roles of about equal size), and any viewer patient enough to sit through all 110 minutes will be rewarded by a warm and poignant final scene. But this test of endurance is made more difficult by the fact that Jarmusch intentionally extends his scenarios to maddening lengths, evoking the relatable discomfort that comes from spending time with relatives one can no longer relate to. A triptych of three separate stories that nonetheless repeat motifs and even snatches of dialogue, Jarmusch’s film is less interested in exploring a variety of situations than presupposing that all families are more or less the same. There’s a sense that the director didn’t have enough story in any one of these get-togethers to make a full feature, but the anthology format serves only to multiply this deficiency. Irritating to endure, the film is best enjoyed in retrospect, considered abstractly. 

In his acceptance speech for the Lion, Jarmusch built on fellow American Benny Safdie’s reference to cinema as a gesture of “radical empathy” (a concept Safdie had incongruously introduced while accepting the Best Director award for his Smashing Machine). Expanding on this, Jarmusch noted: “Art does not have to address politics directly to be political. It can engender empathy and a connection between us, which is the first step for solving things, problems that we have.” This vague assessment of empathy could be understood as, in its own bumbling way, as the American acknowledgement of the devastation in Gaza, and the need to pay some kind of lip service to it. But Jarmusch’s film seemed more interested in estrangement than empathy. It patiently records (and purports as universal) the failure to understand even the people one is closest to, and the context one comes from.

While it’s true that cinema is an incredible tool of empathy – of testimony, documentation and presence – I would not look to Jarmusch’s film (or Safdie’s) for lessons on the subject. Instead, try turning to some of the astonishing documentaries from this year’s slate of nonfiction filmmakers. Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds is a black-and-white portrait of modern day Naples in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, still an active volcano. Reverent examinations of the city’s education, transportation and historic conservation are held together by a central motif of late-night calls to an emergency help center (the same kind as the one seen in Hind Rajab) where local residents’ anxieties about earthquakes, reports of domestic violence and speculations on when Naples might become the next Pompeii are calmly addressed by an infinitely patient staff. This is the unexpected delight of the film, the most vivid local color coming from a seemingly bureaucratic setting. It’s a necessary reminder, in these days where no social nicety can be taken for granted, that humans have for a long time quietly maintained the infrastructure to care for one another, and that caring is a job anybody can do.

Another lesson in fellow feeling comes in Lucretia Martel’s Nuestra Tierra, which employs a variety of media and narrative techniques to reconstruct the 2009 murder of Indigenous rights activist Javier Chocobar. The documentary simultaneously weaves together a portrait of Chocobar’s community in rural Argentina, multiple reenactments of the encounter with land surveyors that led to his death, and the criminal case against those surveyors as it approaches its verdict. Fascinating and expertly told, the story uses the momentum of legal drama to slip in details about the lives of Chacobar’s Chuschagasta community. In doing so, it offers a rare glimpse of a contemporary Indigenous group that was made with the full participation of its members. While Martel works hard to pin down details of Chacobar’s death and its impact in Argentina today, the film really sings as it expands into questions of pedagogy and perspective. Many of the community members reveal that, growing up, they didn’t even know they were Indigenous, because they were taught in school that Argentina’s Indigenous people had disappeared years ago. Such details get at the heart of how people relate to one another by revealing how identity is constructed and racial hierarchy maintained. In meticulously documenting the various legal fictions by which Indigenous people have been stripped of their rights, Martel crafts a timely response to colonial land theft.

Or, if you want to really expand your definition of empathy, try Ildikó Enyedi’s meditative Silent Friend, my personal favorite from the festival. Set in Germany across three different eras, the  story revolves around a large gingko tree, which grows in the garden of a local university. In three interwoven stories, various visitors encounter and appreciate the tree, climbing its limbs and experiencing its shade, leading each one to explore the post-Darwinian notion that plants are in some way sentient, capable of experiencing the world around them and affecting it through modulations in energy. The film is full of sciencey images like EKG monitors attached to leaves, but there’s no need to take these endeavors too seriously. After all, as one character notes near the start of the film, science experiments are just a kind of metaphor, a way of altering our relationship to the world around us by changing how we see it. The data we gather will inevitably fall within the parameters we have set for ourselves. So why not be bold, and dare to open our perspectives and question what it is we take for granted? Enyedi’s film reminds us that empathy begins with curiosity about the experiences of beings different from ourselves, a practice only too necessary in our moment of entrenched positions and perspectives.