05/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: Through screenings, conferences and symbolic gestures, the festival has demonstrated how cinema can become a powerful sounding board for spreading testimony and inspiring resistance

The sail of the Oedipus Rex, an initiative supported by Giornate degli Autori and Isola di Edipo

The Venice Film Festival has become a prominent stage for giving voice to the Palestinian cause. Through screenings, conferences and symbolic gestures, the festival has demonstrated how cinema can become a powerful sounding board for spreading testimony and inspiring resistance.

The message is loud and clear straight away: the sail of the Oedipus Rex billows in the wind with the colours of the Palestinian flag, accompanied by the words “From Venice to Gaza”. The initiative, supported by Giornate degli Autori and Isola di Edipo, was made possible thanks to the producers of the Orizzonti opening film Mother [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Teona Strugar Mitevska
film profile] (Sisters and Brother Mitevski) and Wanted Cinema (the Italian distributor of No Other Land [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
film profile] and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk).

If the screening of Kaouther Ben Hania‘s The Voice of Hind Rajab [+see also:
film review
film profile], which received a 27-minute standing ovation, represents the culmination of the exposure of the ongoing genocide in Gaza for the Venetian audience, it is also important to mention Nicolas Wadimoff's extraordinary documentary Who Is Still Alive [+see also:
film review
film profile], a special event in the Giornate degli Autori, which was also shown on 3 September. The documentary delves into the lives of nine Palestinians who recount the destruction of Gaza, their losses, their memories, and their situation as exiles and refugees. A significant fact is that of the nine protagonists, five - the women in the documentary - did not obtain visas to travel to Italy.

On 5 September, at noon, the Sala Laguna hosted a special meeting with director Sepideh Farsi to remember Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian photographer who documented the war in Gaza City from the beginning of the conflict in 2023. Fatma was killed along with her family in a targeted bombing the day after the film's selection at Cannes was announced. The photographer is the subject of Farsi's documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. The event, moderated by Giorgio Gosetti and Maria Bonsanti, echoed the testimony of an artist who has made her artistic signature synonymous with a commitment to freedom of expression in Iran, and who continues to denounce the massacres in Palestine. "Cinema is the art form that can best become a powerful weapon of resistance against brutality and violence," she said. The meeting was also promoted by EMERGENCY together with the R1PUD1A campaign and by Articolo 21, which focuses on the protection of journalists.

Finally, Venice4Palestine made two symbolic but specific requests to the Venice Film Festival to round off the edition: to display the Palestinian flag alongside those on the Palazzo del Cinema and to lend visibility to the Global Sumud Flotilla initiative during the closing ceremony. The appeal was also extended to the artists, who were invited to bring symbols of support for Palestine up on stage on the final evening.

Venice4Palestine also promoted a meeting with anti-Zionist Israeli director Eyal Sivan and Jacopo Crovella, of BDS Italia, to explore the importance and purpose of the boycott in relation to the controversy over censorship. Sivan explained: "Institutions of power are the ones that censor, while the boycott was born as a grassroots tool to avoid complicity. It does not aim to censor the content of Israeli productions, but is an attempt to avoid normalising Israel's presence at these events... Because culture cannot be neutral; it has a duty to take a stand when neutrality means supporting the oppressor."

In Venice, an extraordinary and unprecedented collective mobilisation, through screenings, demonstrations, debates and symbolic gestures, demonstrated that cinema can, and must, be a tool for reflection on the present and for resistance, a voice and a perspective that contribute to action for change.

(Translated from Italian)