Separated. Image credit: Nafis Azad. Courtesy of Venice
While the Venice film festival is widely treated as an awards platform for starry auteur-driven dramas, its little-known secret is a modest but strong nonfiction selection. For years Venice has been the premiere of choice for Frederick Wiseman, who won a lifetime achievement award there in 2014 and whose work entered an especially rich phase under the festival’s spotlight. In 2022, the Golden Lion for Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed put documentary front and center there (preceded by the 2013 top award for Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA). But whether it’s a Hollywoodgate or the latest from another Venice regular, Errol Morris, the festival always harbors at least a couple of documentaries that should draw attention away from red-carpet chatter. Even without counting the Wang Bing film in competition, which screened too late for many critics (including this one) to cover, this year’s crop was remarkable for the breadth and variety of the nonfiction approaches.
Morris’s Separated screened very early in the festival and, like most Errol Morris movies, seemed to be not exactly the Errol Morris movie many people expected. The movie that he actually made retraces the cruel policy of separating thousands of children from their immigrating parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Separated is serious-minded and intentionally topical, acting as a reminder of what 60-plus million Americans voted into being and threaten to support again. Not that the film tut-tuts viewers; its tick-tock of the policy’s initiation, complete with email paper-trail, is damning enough.
If American Dharma (2018) envisions the hellish world according to Steve Bannon—and won Morris opprobrium for his troubles—then Separated plainly presents men and women of conscience coping with directives discouraging immigration through state-enforced cruelty. The most eloquent and forceful is Jonathan White of the Department of Health and Human Services, who still seems tormented by the ordeal, contrasting with the fratboy banality of Trump appointee Scott Lloyd. Crediting Jacob Soboroff’s book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Morris also intersperses a dramatization of a mother and child trekking to the border that uses obstructed locked-down compositions to marginalize the two within each image, though one also wonders what a feature-length portrait treatment of White alone might have been like. As Morris is more often invested in ambiguities and the mechanisms whirring behind worldviews, Separated is remarkable for its moral clarity. But even as White seems to stand out from fellow dissenters in government for his commitment to resistance, the film leaves unanswered how and whether this kind of courage will manifest.
A very different kind of behind-the-scenes film, Elizabeth Lo’s quietly roiling Mistress Dispeller chronicles the disruption of a man’s affair by an intermediary hired by his wife. The title refers to a burgeoning profession, amid booming economies and infidelity rates in China, that charges tens of thousands of dollars to dissolve a threat to a marriage; in this case, a Mrs. Li hires the shrewd and sensitive Wang Zhenxi to separate her husband from “the other woman,” whom she knows to exist from glimpsing texts of an incriminatingly familiar (though not explicit) nature. Observing Wang befriend both middle-aged Mr. Li and the much younger Fei Fei, and coach Mrs. Li through her turmoil, Lo produces an emotionally perceptive, mature, and at times lyrical text out of a highly mediated premise.
Rather than gotcha scenarios or reality-show dramas, the scenes are mostly low-key hangouts with Mr. Li or with Fei Fei, with and without Wang’s skillfully querying presence. Whether at a badminton court, in cafes, or in the Lis’ car, the lengthy, static, often symmetrical shots make the diffident trickle of feeling and realization poignant, the repression palpable. There is deception by degrees: Wang poses as Mr. Li’s cousin to Fei Fei; according to press notes, Mr. Li and Fei Fei were told by Wang’s business partner that the subject of the film was modern love in China (which is not entirely wrong). Yet the introspective Fei Fei says she appreciates Wang’s sincerity about the situation which sees Fei Fei schlepping by train to meet Mr. Li, a business vendor associate, and being denied a full-fledged relationship (despite his evident tenderness). Lo is committed to sitting with the lovelorn melancholy and simmering frustration of it all—everybody’s alone in this trio in different ways—and deploys romantic music partly, I think, to avoid a goal-oriented narrative drive. A super-civilized confab near the end avoids tying a lessons-learned bow on the story, and incidentally is as dramatic as anything in flamboyant adultery drama Babygirl, which also premiered at Venice.
War inevitably left its mark on the Venice lineup too, and meriting first mention is an overlooked film on a gallingly overlooked conflict history. Hind Meddeb’s Sudan, Remember Us visits with young activists in Khartoum in spring of 2019 after the toppling of the El Bashir dictatorship, and so does not cover the past year and a half of new murderous civil war. Building the film around revolutionary culture, Meddeb dwells on songs and protest chants and martyr graffiti and the sustenance of solidarity, a la Tahrir Square or, in another era, Maidan. Military crackdowns ratchet violence back up, wounding the struggle for self-determination and apparently leading the film’s dedicated subjects to flee the country, leaving audiences to think of the millions who cannot exit in this way.
Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth adds to the necessary self-documenting of Ukraine’s survival under Russian attack. It has similarities to Sergei Loznitsa’s somewhat Wiseman-esque The Invasion, but edges into more of a “country symphony”—starting with the nightmarish overture of emergency-service call-ins on the night Russia began bombing Kiev and the crush of crowds at the train stations. At times disconcertingly beautiful but sober in outlook, Songs finds the ways in which death reverberates through Ukrainian society, with notable attention to the regenerative imagination of children. One scene allows for the momentary triumph of cutting Soviet symbols out of a gargantuan metal monument, but this surgery can’t address the ongoing injury of the invasion. Songs was screened for critics mere hours before the highly unfortunate Russians at War, a misbegotten documentary that sympathizes with invading soldiers and obscenely treats the criminal barbarity of Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine without truly reckoning with culpability, as if “war” just happens to people.
Let’s take a breather with a pair of pop music documentaries. Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko follows the new New Yorkers in the run-up to Lennon’s August 1972 benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, as the couple mobilize for political awareness in the cultural come-down after the 1960s. With the Vietnam War ongoing and the FBI still harassing putative agitators, Lennon correctly suspected that he was under surveillance and began recording his calls as a safeguard. Amid the film’s TV-clip blizzard of banal ads, public pronouncements, and chat-show interviews, Macdonald creates an intimate throughline on Lennon’s thinking with lengthy audio clips from his calls. Lennon and Ono (who also appears in the recordings), do not come across as dilettante rocktivists, even alongside the outspoken presences of Allen Ginsberg or Jerry Rubin in the archival clips. Lennon’s memories of his mother lend a genuine pang to the snappily hi-fi clips from the concerts, which smartly include Ono’s noise-rock howling. A re-creation of their Greenwich Village apartment becomes a memory-palace touchstone to the film, and all culminates—a little queasily, given the ongoing problems there—with a Central Park celebration with the concert’s beneficiaries, residents from the Willowbrook institution where the developmentally disabled were abused and neglected.
One to One was not the only Beatles-related film at Venice pegged to a performance; also screening was Andrei Ujica’s TWST: Things We Said Today, an archival imagining of New York, with animated flourishes, in the run-up to the band’s August 1965 Shea Stadium show. But I did see Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s hybrid meditation on a canonical band of the 1990s, fractured into multiple formal components: the making of a fictive biopic, rehearsals for a Pavement jukebox-style musical (which was performed one weekend only outside of this film), preparations for a museum exhibition about Pavement, appearances by bandmembers today that are woven into the above present-tense elements, and often rare archival clips of concerts and interviews. The latter often comes across as a deadpan struggle with the very idea of being understood or assimilated; at one point, frontman and songwriter Stephen Malkmus says: “When your dreams come true like that, it can be quite scary.” Perry’s premise posits that the band’s ineffable cred and complicated self-positioning are ill-served by a conventional commemorative documentary, and I’d have to agree, while also applauding the plenitude of actual music by the band that is in the film—something that many music docs fall short at. With screen-play to echo Pavement’s word-play and musical eccentricities, Pavements is a worthy tribute that steers clear of that decade’s turn into mise-en-abyme reflexivity.
Close Venice-watchers may have noticed at least a couple of other notable titles in the slate, though to my eyes their reach exceeded their grasp. Riefenstahl seems to consist of nearly two hours of the infamous filmmaker acting indignant and self-righteous about being correctly called a prime mythologizer on behalf of the Nazi regime. Its first half-hour of waffly atmospheric scene-setting is downright maddening, throat-clearing as if no one had ever made a film about or written about Riefenstahl before. Apocalypse in the Tropics, from acclaimed filmmaker Petra Costa, also felt like a let-down, though it does drive home the role of evangelism in the rise of Bolsonaro in Brazil with the help of loudmouth svengali Silas Malafaia. But it assumes perhaps a little too much ignorance on the audience’s behalf, crawling through the country’s political timeline, and deflating the impact of its Jan-6-echoing climax, when Bolsonaro supporters rioted and attacked the congressional complex in 2023 following his loss. But like other documentaries at this year’s Venice festival, these re-told stories can still feel important and clarifying in an ever-chaotic, amnesiac age. Let’s just hope the standouts make it to further-flung precincts beyond this city on the sea.
Nicolas Rapold is the host of the podcast The Last Thing I Saw, a frequent contributor to numerous publications, and former editor-in-chief of Film Comment. He is editing a book of interviews with Frederick Wiseman.