By Sara Bright
It begins with the light. Not the brutal, bleaching glare of a Hollywood sun, but the unique, painterly light of the Venetian lagoon. It is a soft, almost liquid gold that slants across the water, catching the prows of the Riva taxis as they cut through the canal, and illuminating the ancient, crumbling facades in a way that seems to exist outside of time. This is the light of the Venice Film Festival, and its quality is a quiet reminder that this is not just another stop on the awards circuit. It is a conversation with history.
The opening of the 82nd edition was no exception. The red carpet that snaked along the Lido was, as always, a theatre of high glamour and strategic branding. But beneath the surface of the silk and the flashbulbs, there was a more complex story being told. This was an opening night defined by ghosts: the ghosts of cinema’s past, the ghosts of Italy’s own complex identity, and the lingering question of what a film festival is for in an age of fractured attention.
The Overture in Red
A red carpet is an overture, a series of musical phrases that introduce the main themes of the opera to come. The first notes are always the icons, the figures who carry the weight of cinematic intelligence as effortlessly as they wear couture. Cate Blanchett arrived in a swathe of midnight blue, a garment that seemed sculpted rather than sewn, her presence a quiet rebuke to the frivolity around her. Tilda Swinton, ever the art installation, appeared in something architectural and stark, her otherworldly poise a performance in itself. They are not just actresses; they are the high priestesses of a certain kind of serious, intelligent cinema, and their arrival sets the intellectual tone.
Then come the legends, the living history. The most telling photograph of the night might be of Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola, standing together. They are men who have redefined the language of film, who have stared into the abyss of the jungle and the human heart and brought back images that are now seared into our collective consciousness. Their presence is a physical link to a wilder, more ambitious era of filmmaking. They are the ghosts in the machine, their combined filmographies a silent counterpoint to the noise of the present.
Of course, the overture also needs its high, crowd-pleasing notes. Heidi Klum and her daughter Leni, Barbara Palvin, a constellation of models and influencers – they represent the festival’s other, equally vital function as a global platform for luxury and celebrity. This is the modern machinery of fame, a polished, professional performance of glamour that is as much a part of the Venice ecosystem as the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square. In a sense, the tension between a Swinton and a supermodel is the central tension of the festival itself: a constant, delicate negotiation between art and commerce, between the difficult and the dazzling.
The Spectres on Screen
The conversation with the past continued in the cinema itself. The festival opened with Paolo Sorrentino’s Grace, a film that sees him return to his great muse, the actor Toni Servillo. The story of a fictional Italian president, the film is, by all accounts, another of Sorrentino’s baroque, melancholic explorations of power, beauty, and the magnificent decay of the Italian soul. Sorrentino is a filmmaker obsessed with ghosts – the ghost of Fellini, the ghost of Rome’s imperial glory, the ghost of an idealised past that may never have existed. To open Venice with his work is to place the festival firmly in a dialogue with Italy’s own sense of self.
The main competition promises to continue this exploration of history and its discontents. Jim Jarmusch’s Father, Mother, Sister, Brother and Noah Baumbach’s latest are set to explore the intimate, often haunted, landscape of the family. Olivier Assayas’s political thriller, adapted from a novel about the inner workings of power, speaks to a more urgent, contemporary anxiety. These are filmmakers who understand that the most compelling dramas are often the ones that play out in the quiet spaces between people, in the weight of things unsaid.
The Lion in Winter
The emotional centrepiece of the evening was the presentation of the Honorary Golden Lion to Werner Herzog. There could be no more fitting recipient. Herzog is a filmmaker who has made a career of charting the borderlands between obsession and madness, between the sublime beauty of the natural world and the profound absurdity of the human condition. He is a romantic in the truest, most terrifying sense of the word.
To honour Herzog in 2025 is to honour a certain kind of uncompromising, cinematic vision that is increasingly rare. He is a man who has pulled a steamship over a mountain, who has filmed on the edge of an active volcano, who has hypnotised his actors. He is a living rebuke to the safe, committee-driven filmmaking that dominates so much of the industry. His new documentary, Ghost Elephants, which will screen out of competition, is a perfectly Herzogian premise: a search for a herd of mythical elephants in the highlands of Angola. It is a quest for a ghost, a journey into a landscape of rumour and memory. In a sense, it is a metaphor for his entire career.
The Promise of the Dark
As the celebrities retreated from the red carpet and the audiences settled into the velvet seats of the Sala Grande, the true purpose of the festival began. The glamour and the noise of the opening night are a necessary ritual, a spectacle that generates the global attention that allows the films themselves to exist. But the real work of Venice happens in the dark.
This year’s line-up suggests a festival that is looking both backwards and forwards. It is a programme that honours the masters while making space for new voices. It is grappling with the weight of history, both personal and political, while searching for a language to describe our fractured present. It is a festival that understands that cinema, at its best, is a ghost machine, a place where the past is never truly past, and where the dead can be brought back to life, flickering at 24 frames a second. And for the next ten days, in the cool dark of the cinema, we will get to watch it all unfold.
