Venice Goes Rogue: The Women Rewriting the Rules
The Venice Film Festival has always known how to make a statement, but this edition feels less like a showcase and more like a reckoning.
Venice Goes Rogue: The Women Rewriting the Rules
The Venice Film Festival has always known how to make a statement, but this edition feels less like a showcase and more like a reckoning. Three women, three radically different stories, one unmistakable through-line: the industry spent decades telling them the room wasn't theirs, and they walked in anyway.
Alina Șerban is the name you need to know. The Roma filmmaker has spent her career navigating a film industry that has historically treated her community as subject matter rather than authorship — something to be documented by outsiders, not directed from within. *I Matter*, her feature-length directorial debut premiering at Venice, is by her own account something she had no business being able to make, in the best possible sense. "I managed to do something impossible," she said, and you believe her not because the quote is dramatic but because the industry's track record makes it factually accurate. This is a debut that arrives carrying the weight of representation that shouldn't have to exist, and Șerban carries it without collapsing under it.
Then there is May el-Toukhy, whose *Woman Unknown* excavates the women branded as "horizontal collaborators" during World War II — those accused of relationships with German soldiers — and refuses to let the verdict stand unexamined. El-Toukhy is also the person pointing out, with the particular exhaustion of someone who has done this more than once, that Venice's selection of female directors remains a structural failure, not an oversight. The word "structural" is doing a lot of work there, and she knows exactly how much.
Somewhere between high art and something far stranger, Lance Oppenheim's *Primetime* has Robert Pattinson transforming into Chris Hansen — the face of *To Catch a Predator*, the 2000s television phenomenon that turned predator entrapment into primetime entertainment. Pattinson, who has spent the decade since *Twilight* systematically dismantling every expectation anyone had of him, apparently lets rip here in ways that make the Vogue coverage sound almost alarmed. A true-crime thriller about a show that was itself performing justice while the cameras rolled — there is something almost too on-the-nose about bringing that to Venice, which has never met a mirror it didn't want to point at the audience.
And then there is Wim Wenders, eighty years old, fourteen years in the making, returning to 3D for a portrait of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. *From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor* is the kind of film that exists outside every algorithm and refuses to apologise for it. Wenders directed *Pina* in 3D in 2011 and understood something about that format that most directors never grasped — that it creates presence, not spectacle. Architecture as a subject for 3D documentary filmmaking is either obvious or insane, and Wenders has always been the director who makes those two things indistinguishable.
The devastating verdict: Venice 2026 is doing exactly what film festivals exist to do — surfacing the stories the market never would have found on its own.
