venice Says It's "Not Political." Then It Put a Gaza Documentary in Competition.
Venice tried to cancel its own jury press conference this week. The official line was a "scheduling conflict." Nobody believed it, and by the next day the conference was back on the calendar, which tells you everything about how confident the festival is in its own excuse.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival has spent this edition insisting it's a cinema showcase, not a political stage — right up until it programmed Naza, the only documentary in competition for the Golden Lion, and one that's impossible to talk about apolitically. It's directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four filmmakers behind No Other Land, the Israeli-Palestinian collaboration that won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature last year. Naza is produced by The Guardian and James Wilson, with Jonathan Glazer — who turned The Zone of Interest into one of the most unsettling studies of complicity ever put on screen — signed on as executive producer. Per the festival's own synopsis, the film was shot at night on Tel Aviv rooftops and examines the systems behind civilian deaths in Gaza. It premieres September 10, two days before the festival closes.
That's the backdrop the jury press conference flap sits against. Reuters and trade reporters have noted that festival pressers have turned into what one outlet called "landmines" of political questioning — last year's jury president, Alexander Payne, sidestepped Gaza questions entirely rather than answer them on the record. This year's jury, led by Maggie Gyllenhaal and including Kaouther Ben Hania, Daniel Blumberg, and Johnnie To, was clearly bracing for the same. Ben Hania didn't wait for the press conference to make a statement anyway: she walked the carpet with a bag decorated in metallic olive branches, a recognizable symbol of Palestinian land and resilience. Italian actress Greta Scarano carried a watermelon fan to a photocall — the fruit's red, green, black, and white a long-running visual stand-in for the Palestinian flag in places where the flag itself gets flagged. Over 200 industry figures, including Annie Ernaux, Roger Waters, Guy Pearce, and Céline Sciamma, signed a Venice4Palestine open letter this week calling for "concrete action." George Clooney, on the Lido to collect a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, used his platform to back Mark Ruffalo's right to publicly criticize Israeli-linked business interests without it costing him work.
None of this is really about whether Venice is "political." Every festival is: programming choices are editorial choices, and a lineup is an argument about what deserves the world's attention this year. What's actually being tested is whether Venice can keep pretending otherwise while running a competition slate that includes a film literally built around wartime footage and casualty mechanisms. The festival can dodge the press conference. It can't dodge the premiere.
Worth watching for the next five days: whether Naza actually contends for the Lion when the jury announces winners September 12, and whether Barbera's festival keeps insisting, with a straight face, that none of this counts as politics.