The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opened on 2 September with the world premiere of Danny Boyle’s newspaper drama Ink in the Sala Grande. Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal, appointed to the role in April, told organisers that an honest film about another person’s experience carries a political charge whether or not its director intends one. Her position set the tone for a fortnight already marked by arguments over gender balance and Russian participation.
Those arguments were not new to Venice, but their intensity was. A festival built for a century on aesthetic judgement now finds itself asked to certify the correct political stance before a single reel has run. That pressure says as much about the present public mood as it does about this year’s programme.
Empathy Carries Its Own Politics
Gyllenhaal’s argument went beyond a simple endorsement of overtly political filmmaking.
She suggested that cinema turns political through empathy itself, since entering another person’s experience changes how audiences read power and institutions. Announcing herappointment, the Biennale quoted her saying she would approach the jury “not in judgement, but in curiosity, admiration and excitement,” a stance she has repeated since arriving on the Lido.
Nobody needed to force politics into this year’s slate. Selections dealing with Gaza, intelligence agencies and post-invasion Russia already carry it, alongside Boyle’s opening film about Rupert Murdoch’s transformation of the British press. The Biennale’s own announcement describes Ink as an account of publisher Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the daily newspaper The Sun, hardly a neutral subject for an opening night. The harder problem starts once audiences expect the people behind every film to supply the correct political reading too.
Representation Joins the Judging Process
Gender produced a separate dispute. Only two of the 21 films competing for the Golden Lion this year were directed by women, a figure Gyllenhaal called systemic rather than accidental. Festival leadership pointed to the pipeline itself, noting that women accounted for roughly 24 per cent of submissions, meaning the imbalance begins long before any selection committee opens a single file.
That explanation does not settle the argument. Financing, distribution and reputation decide which projects reach completion well before Venice ever sees them, yet a major festival also helps decide which directors earn the standing to secure their next production. Representation is therefore both an artistic and an institutional question, and treating every selection primarily through the identity of its director risks flattening judgement into demographic accounting rather than sharpening it.
War Tests the Limits of Free Speech
The most difficult controversy involves Russia and Ukraine directly. Ukraine’s foreign and culture ministries jointly condemned the inclusion of Dau, directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky, arguing that the film’s presence in competition raises profound concern given its ties to Kremlin-linked financing. Khrzhanovsky rejects the criticism and has long positioned the project as hostile to Soviet authoritarianism rather than sympathetic to it.
A separate dispute surrounds the wider Biennale after Russia returned to its national pavilion for the first time since the invasion began. The European Commission subsequently withdrew a €2 million grant, a decision the Biennale said it would contest through every available channel. Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, a vocal opponent of the war, has nonetheless argued that institutions should not punish an entire artistic community for the actions of its state.
Fame Now Demands a Political Position
Dolly Parton offers a useful contrast, since music and cinema increasingly sit under similar pressure.
Parton held clear personal values for decades, backing gay rights and funding literacy projects, without her career turning into a partisan programme. Contemporary celebrity culture makes that separation harder to hold: a Taylor Swift endorsement counts as an international political event, and actors face election questions during ordinary film promotion.
Political cinema is not weakened by uncomfortable films sharing a programme with festival glamour. It weakens when audiences will only accept work whose moral position has been settled in advance, and when nationality substitutes for judging the work itself. Venice’s own jury, drawn from seven countries with sharply different histories, shows that disagreement can sit inside a single room without collapsing into consensus. Tradition and artistic freedom deserve serious defence, but neither deserves protection from scrutiny once war, financing and representation are already on the table.
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