Every big festival has a red thread, visible to anyone patient enough to look. Last Venice it was the world on the eve of catastrophe; Cannes 2025 brooded over authoritarianism; a suddenly apolitical Berlinale turned toward family and childhood. The 83rd Venice Film Festival, which closed on 12 September, found its own: the media, and what the media have done to reality. As Ekaterina Barabash wrote for ZIMA Magazine, three very different films caught journalism at the exact moment its relationship with the real reaches maximum voltage.
The tabloid spring
The festival opened with Danny Boyle’s Ink, about the making of the modern Sun. October 1969: the Australian Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) hires the ambitious Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) to run the dying paper, with Claire Foy as Jules, the composite colleague who voices the film’s uneasy conscience. The relaunched Sun writes about rumour, drink, television and sex, gives horoscopes a page and women a voice, and its sales climb until, within the decade, it overtakes the Daily Mirror. Critics, then and now, called it the fall of standards; Murdoch and Lamb called it telling people the truth about what interests them. Anton Dolin, covering the festival for Meduza, found the film entertaining but thin – a shout of “look what we have come to” stretched over a fairly banal rise-and-fall, ending in an apocalyptic montage of half a century of rotten sensations, wars included.
The prime-time abyss
If Ink mourns the press, Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime – his fiction debut, with Robert Pattinson – weaponises it. Pattinson plays a television journalist modelled on Chris Hansen, host of the American reality show To Catch a Predator (2004-2007), and Oppenheim, a documentarian by trade, openly cites De Palma and Stone’s Natural Born Killers for what Pattinson calls a “docufantasy” in scorched television colours. Where Boyle reconstructs an industry, Oppenheim stages the metaphysics of the deal with the powerful: destinies surrendered to storytelling, methodologically close to a tabloid’s, spiritually closer to a nightmare.
The exile’s iPhone
After Boyle and Oppenheim, Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends. Part II – Exile runs nearly six hours and feels beamed from another planet. No moguls, no stars, almost none of the professional infrastructure the word “media” implies: Russian journalists who left after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine – the crews of Dozhd, Vazhnye Istorii, Novaya Gazeta – in rented flats, airports and transfers, filmed on the director’s iPhone. Part I showed their ordinary Moscow life with catastrophe approaching; in Part II the catastrophe has happened. There is fear, exhaustion, work, and a second exile inside the first.
The verdict on the verdicts
The three films rhyme precisely where it hurts: where does documentation end and dramaturgy begin, when does a witness become a character, what happens to a fact once it joins the spectacle? The point, Barabash argues, is not the stale charge that journalism distorts reality. It is that the border itself has dissolved – and together the films tell sixty years of mediation, from newsprint to the smartphone, as the story of the middleman’s changing status between event and audience.
The prizes told a parallel story. The Golden Lion went to May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown, a postwar Danish drama whose star Mathilde Arcel also took best actress – a rare double, and El-Toukhy is only the eighth woman to win the festival’s top prize. Lee Chang-dong took the runner-up prize, Ilya Khrzhanovsky won best director for the decades-in-the-making DAU, John Malkovich won best actor for Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, and the Gaza documentary NAZA – Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor behind it – took the Special Jury Prize after a record 25-minute ovation. A festival that put the press on trial ended by honouring, among others, two documentaries about who gets to film the truth. The symmetry was probably accidental. It was certainly perfect.
