“Today’s gonna be tough for us,” mutters an endearing Italian journalist sympathetically as I scramble to find a spot to work amid the backrooms of queuing for security, coffee, toilet, food, screenings, then again security, and so on. He’s right. The Venice Film Festival has always had dubious logistics, but the days when the hottest A-listers arrive are nightmarish. In that sense, the 5th of September is the most overwhelming for us scribblers doing the footwork. Robert Pattinson is about to arrive.
Jokes aside, the season this Brit has had so far is one for the ages. After stellar turns in The Drama and The Odyssey, he arrives at the Lido as the star and producer of docudirector Lance Oppenheim’s (Some Kind of Heaven) first scripted feature, Primetime. Three films and several of the decade’s biggest memes (which Pattinson confessed to loving at a press conference) later, the biggest star of his generation isn’t even done yet. This Christmas, he’ll hit us with another villainous turn as Scytale in Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Three.
As casual and accredited fans alike descended from the crack of dawn, swiftly clogging the few mobility arteries and food stands around, the rest of us accepted that reaching either food or a toilet at will was now an unrealistic ambition. One 45-minute line for lunch (the only meal for the day), two 20-minute lines for toilet use (gotta pace yourself), a good hour and a half in line if you wanted to discuss Primetime at a press conference, and maybe you’ll get around to seeing two films and working for a moment before hitting the 30-minute queue for the boat to take you back to your accommodation. Just make sure the films you want to see are not shown at PalaBiennale, as the venue is outside the main festival premises, so the queue to get back in will be another cool half hour.
Such is festival work, though. The awards-bait and prestige-play flicks rely on hype to thrive, and with the cinema Biennale as the preeminent fall launchpad, it would be foolish to think their actual tasking—in this case, watching films—won’t suffer. Amid the crowds, noise, and chaos, however, interesting and important things emerge.
Midway through the festival, the Gaza Cinema Academy launches to offer young Palestinians, especially women, access to film education and opportunities to present their work to international audiences. Alex Gibney’s 225-minute documentary Musk trashes the planet’s richest man and thrills critics. Without turning a blind eye to today’s atrocities, this year’s films lean heavily on politics while also calling out those responsible for countless current economic and social catastrophes.
Right after the opening, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine blew the lid off the conversation about individual and collective responsibilities for war crimes. Hard on the heels of other works about the Gaza genocide recently shown in Venice (last year’s The Voice of Hind Rajab and this year’s Citizen Osama) or at other festivals, Naza, the new documentary from No Other Land’s co-directors, Israeli investigative reporters Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, set the festival record for standing ovations, clocking in at a stupefying 24.5 minutes. For Naza, Abraham and Szor did anonymized interviews with 24 soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces, who asserted their actions in Gaza over the past years constituted war crimes and genocide.
Expectedly, the documentary immediately became a heated talking point worldwide. Venice Jury President Maggie Gylenhaal described Naza as a film about “systemic” deeds and commended the authors’ bravery. On the other side of the world, Israeli officials condemned the release and its authors, with culture minister Miki Zohar demanding they be stripped of their citizenship. The film ultimately won the Special Jury Prize and universal critical acclaim.
Meanwhile, it has to be noted that Palestinian filmmakers and other civilians have documented the violence against them for a long time. Ahmed Hassouna’s Citizen Osama, screened out of competition, deals with the horrendous consequences of genocide directly on Palestinian soil, but it has received only a fraction of the attention Naza, made by Israeli authors, has.
The epistemic injustice against the Palestinian people, whose voices have been ignored by the “Western” mainstream media, is deeply entrenched in the “Western” culture; it might be condoned by the imperial establishments, but it won’t be forgiven by history. If the proverbial call must come from inside the house, it’s good that there are people courageous enough to make Naza. After all, evidence is evidence, for when we finally get around to it.
Ten days and 88 new feature films later, May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown, the only feature in competition wholly directed by a woman, won the Golden Lion. Meanwhile, dozens of strong or at least intriguing films ignited much-needed conversations about global politics and what is to be done. I can’t remember a stronger season this century, and we’re just getting started.
Here is an overview of two more releases we will be talking about during the winter season.
15/18: A Place to Heal – Director: Cédric Kahn
Teenage dramas, a genre unto itself, are a terrain so slippery one often finds oneself in the gutter, both making and watching them. Either oversimplified or overly romantic, too many stories about kids searching for their place under the Sun end up vapid or feel-good moralizations that reduce young people to tropes and their personalities to a primitive, not merely less experienced, version of adults’.
Luckily, actor-director Cédric Kahn respects young adults enough to let them be complex, flawed people with complex, flawed stories; if anything, his A Place to Heal de-romanticizes the plights of growing up, nearly to a fault. Titled 15/18 internationally because of the age bracket it represents, Kahn’s latest is an unflinching story of teenagers in a closed youth psychiatric ward. Narrating the emerging destinies of a large group of kids with wildly diverse mental health issues, A Place to Heal is a poignant story of hardship but also kinship and solidarity that make all our lives worthwhile, no matter our age.
The incisive dissection of a teen’s inner world, and the way institutions shape people’s lives, begins with Lucia (a fierce Malou Khebizi, of Cannes 2024 Wild Diamond fame), a defiant 17-year-old dragged (literally) back to the ward for the nth time. Emotionally volatile and with extreme attachment issues, underneath the resentful facade, she is an abused kid looking for love. Despite violent altercations with exasperated staff (among them Kahn himself as head psychiatrist Étienne), Lucia quickly settles into a routine with a dozen peers, whose many issues range from body dysmorphia to parental abuse and neglect, suicidal ideation, prostitution, and schizophrenia.
What follows is a docudramatic journey into the world of asylums, told through the eyes of a large ensemble of acting newcomers, who imbue the intense emotions of troubled teens with a visceral realism. Kahn spent months observing the daily routine of psychiatric institutions in France, which yields good narrative results; besides the inevitable focus on the teens’ relationships and problems, A Place to Heal extends much courtesy to the asylum staff, stressed, overworked, underresourced, and relying on their own goodwill to succeed. Through the wide eyes of a nervous new intern, Joules (Antoine de Foucauld), one empathizes with the immense demands of this thankless job.
Kahn, versed in somber, realistic storytelling that exposes social reality through people’s relationships with institutions (The Prayer, The Goldman Case), does wonders with his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli (most recently of Case 137 fame). Their fluid, hyperkinetic camerawork trails the kids’ every movement and catches every grimace and frustrated tic.
Entire lives are contained between the barren asylum walls, something A Place to Heal’s creative team goes to lengths to show. Kahn and Ghiringhelli never romanticize the gravity of being in a psych ward, but they also don’t make the doctors or the institution an inherent enemy; instead, they focus on the humanity found in the most trying scenarios.
Still, it’s the young actors and their vulnerable, kind characters who are the real stars of A Place to Heal. Named for its belief in the possibility of betterment, the film does its stars justice by demonstrating that love remains the primary driving force behind all that’s good in us. Anxious girls holding hands and hugging, kids supporting their peers and sticking up for one another when cornered, show a world where even those of us who have suffered extraordinarily have the extraordinary capacity to give back.
Even when volatile relationships, such as a love triangle between Lucia, the quietly suicidal Eloïse (a breakout Zoé Monpart), and the unhinged new patient Enzo (a magnetic Kenji Peyran), threaten to destabilize the group, the pull of security found in togetherness remains strong.
Despite the unpredictable final act veering into sentimental territory, A Place to Heal serves as a much-needed testament to the worth of every life and the overcoming of adversity through friendship. It’s a sobering but lovingly hopeful release, reminding us that nobody can or should go through this life alone. It is also an overtly political statement about the need for (cross-generational) unity and interpersonal care as the foundation for social improvement. Healing is never guaranteed, but we need kindness from others and ourselves to stand any chance at all.
Possible Love – Director: Lee Chang-dong
In typical Netflix fashion, once the streaming giant elbows itself into a production, things tend to get out of control. Fortunately, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, initially part of a wider project to remake Krzysztof Kieślowski‘s Dekalog as ten feature films, wasn’t bumped off the rails, but rather morphed into a standalone story—albeit still following one of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not covet.” Having won the FIPRESCI prize in Venice and been selected as South Korea’s entry for Best Picture at the 99th Academy Awards, it will surely be among the dramas we will talk about this winter.
It would be foolish and reductive to lump Korean directors, a group as diverse as any, together on the basis of ethnicity alone; yet the Southeast Asian greats do share a distinctly historical and material consciousness of class segregation and its attendant perils. Lee, whose films tend to be more meditative than the visceral work of Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon-ho, nevertheless suffuses his films with emotional savagery that rivals any bloodshed.
As in (to a degree) his latest, 2018’s excellent Burning, Possible Love brings a simmering, ambiguous tale of destinies made divergent through class privilege. It’s a story of fascination, envy, and the injustices the poor endure to be perceived as members of society at all. After the violent satire of Park’s No Other Choice in 2025, Possible Love explores the indignities of being a worker from a different vantage point, not by pitting the proletariat against itself, but by holding up a mirror to the financial elites.
Starring a spectacular Jeon Do-yeon (a former heroine of Lee’s in Secret Sunshine) and Cho Yeo-jeong (a breakout in Bong’s Parasite), Possible Love starts, adequately, with a family going to a funeral. We don’t know exactly whose funeral it is, but it’s almost certainly for a former colleague of Ho-seok (a stoic Sul Kyung-gu), a beleaguered man who never recovered after losing his job months ago. His wife, Mi-ok (Jeon), heroically tries to keep the family stable through Ho-seok’s drunken, depressive episodes, but she, too, is a menial factory worker and a woman of modest means, financially and practically.
In the funeral parking lot, Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s lives change forever when Mi-ok runs into Ye-ji (Cho) and Sang-woo (a swaggering Zo In-sung), a wealthy couple who clearly don’t belong at a workers’ assembly (no matter the reason). Their reason for being there is curious: Ye-ji is making a documentary about the workers’ strike that resulted in mass firings; her dapper husband (who Mi-ok notes “looks like Steve Jobs”) supports the project, as any wealthy dilettante would.
Despite the two couples occupying wildly different positions in the world, Mi-ok and Ye-ji quickly strike up what seems like a genuine friendship, and with Ho-seok’s sad story as the perfect backdrop for Mi-ok’s social-good hobby, the two families’ lives become intertwined in complicated, unpredictable ways. Desire in its many forms—lust, envy, projection, yearning- will swallow the four protagonists whole.
While the plot itself, save for a couple of third-act scenes that must not be spoiled, unspools languidly, the narrative favoring the unspoken, if not the ambiguous, over outright action, Possible Love builds to a breathtakingly calamitous climax viewers won’t soon forget. Each ensemble member fleshes out their character masterfully, but Jeon’s performance haunts. She makes Mi-ok’s whole body burst with a sadness too great for words, relaying the reality of precarious work and undisclosed desire so mercilessly, you will know she’s not merely “speaking” to you—she becomes you, that is, all of us who fear an uncertain future we are powerless to mitigate.
It would be a mistake to assume that the coveting in Possible Love stems from a simple envy of the wealthy and the careless. Returning to the curiously rare talent of the Korean greats, Lee toes the fine line between jealousy and resentment with aplomb, never losing sight of the depths of class tension so great they cannot be transcended by any individual, private relationship.
With its deliberately slow but intensely burning 164 minutes, Possible Love speaks to the contemporary global majority of the disenfranchised, the cast-aside, and the forgotten, the countless people who have fallen through the cracks of economic and political crises. The secrets of Mi-ok’s and Ho-seok’s hearts (there’s an especially distressing scene at a birthday celebration in a restaurant) are neither esoteric nor ambiguous; they want the same things most everyone wants, but have no recourse for social and economic advancement. Coupled with the rare ones to whom the system gave everything, they expose all we lack as a society today, not just financially, but morally.