By early September, the Venetian historic centre presents an atypical emptiness.
With potential visitors occupied by professional commitments and academic schedules, the city’s restaurants grow quiet and its ancient streets become less crowded.
This quieter period allows the famed Italian destination to revert to its more serene character.
During this time, the Film Biennale proceeds with considerable energy and excitement.
Successful navigation of the festival requires adaptability, as schedules frequently undergo modifications.
While advance reservations prove challenging to obtain, cancellations remain straightforward, leading to frequent last-minute ticket opportunities throughout each day.
Some attendees willingly stand for extended periods to secure viewing spots, particularly for high-profile releases.
An initial missed reservation prompted a more relaxed approach to queueing for heavily anticipated screenings.
The 2026 programme features numerous premieres that occur months ahead of commercial releases, offering viewers an exclusive experience as among the earliest global audiences.
Among the works generating significant interest was Danny Boyle’s Trance.
Following a brief period of silence, initial audience reactions proved mixed.
Several notable entries deserve examination.
Discipline received four out of five stars.
Mona Fastvold’s brief work employs innovative puppetry techniques, featuring life-sized dolls physically attached to their performers.
The accompanying soundtrack consists of metallic percussive elements and children’s laughter.
The production explores themes of social constraints based on gender and acts of rebellion against such limitations.
The connection between each puppet and its human operator remains deliberately ambiguous.
Neither the doll, which lacks autonomous movement, nor the concealed performer, executing precise mechanical gestures according to established conventions, fully embodies the represented girlhood.
The resulting atmosphere is profoundly dissociative, with the physical form serving as a substitute unable to represent inner experience.
The conclusion leaves ambiguous whether escape from this disciplined dual existence proves possible, or whether transition merely introduces another form of structured practice, lending the piece an unsettling circular quality.
The work also functions as commentary on the pervasive influence of doctrinal thinking.
Flesh Impact earned four out of five stars.
Any initial doubts regarding short-form cinema were dispelled by this distinguished offering.
Ellen Burstyn portrays an imagined version of Monroe as an aging celebrity attending an audition unrecognised.
Before performing the role of Carol from Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, she discusses with casting personnel the part she embodied in reality as a young woman aspiring to Hollywood achievement, noting with amusement that recognition required only promising future availability rather than actual demonstration.
Dakota Johnson appears intermittently as the younger Marilyn, depicted leaving an audition that transformed into something closer to confrontation, revealing the personal costs incurred in creating and maintaining an image that ultimately constrained her.
Halayon received four out of five stars.
This documentary short follows a man returning to territory from which he was displaced during the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, discovering only natural vegetation covering the landscape.
His narration combines explanation, clarification, and occasional levity, creating a tone simultaneously ironic and sorrowful.
According to filmmaker Avi Mograbi, traces of an ongoing life were encountered throughout.
Fifteen years subsequent, amid another crisis, these images convey not merely loss but also continuity encompassing memory, acknowledgment, and life itself.
The production’s deliberately raw aesthetic, featuring minimal editing and handheld cinematography, defies commercial marketing yet produces an unforgettable viewing experience.
They’re Here received four out of five stars.
This disturbing work presents genuine footage from the three-month immigration enforcement occupation of Minneapolis, submitted anonymously with script material credited to a pseudonym.
The approach combines journalistic methodology with subjective perspective rather than detached reporting.
The intent clearly involves provoking audience response and demonstrating justification for such reaction.
Avec Kim received one out of five stars.
This brief offering fails to communicate meaningful content.
Even granting charitable interpretation as deliberate rejection of conventional storytelling, the production cannot be commended for defying fundamental cinematic requirements beyond mere convention, specifically the capacity to convey at least partially intentional narrative with compelling stakes.
While demanding viewer engagement, the work provides minimal reciprocation.
Rule-breaking merits consideration only when serving genuine purpose.
Look Back received two and a half out of five stars.
Despite accomplished cinematography, the production suffers from superficial thematic treatment and lack of memorability.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s coming-of-age drama, though visually appealing, features characters and narrative elements insufficiently developed to generate emotional investment.
Extended static unedited sequences depicting window silhouettes or desk work, while providing visual respite, are employed excessively throughout, much like the emotional appeal, which relies heavily on the nostalgia suggested by the title.
Les Indes received four out of five stars.
Featuring striking imagery captured in a distinctive rectangular aspect ratio, the production examines the contradictory heritage of an iconic portrait, simultaneously vital and superfluous to the Spanish empire’s final efforts at preservation during its decline.
The narrative centres on a young nobleman tasked with transporting the invaluable Velázquez portrait of the Spanish princess to the young French monarch as a final attempt to resolve conflict between both nations.
During the subsequent question-and-answer session with attending cast and crew, Pauline Julier eloquently characterised the work as fundamentally concerned with journeying and image dissemination.
Character development, she explained, remains secondary despite moments of considerable human poignancy.
The themes of suffering, anticipation, and glimpsing an ideal embodied by the portrait of La Infanta, in whose name burdens are borne, reveal equal concern with those affected by the image as with the image’s own existence.
The presumed deaths of all three travellers during the expedition inject tragic absurdity throughout.
This manifests also in the voicelessness of the young King Louis, theoretically the arbiter of the princess’s suitability, yet constrained by the colonial inheritance into which he was born.
The subject matter should resonate with enthusiasts of art, historical narratives and art historical scholarship.