6 discoveries from Venice Film Festival 2025

Director: Evi Kalogiropoulou

Gorgonà is set in a world where women are a commodity and men are angry masses of muscle – Greek director Evi Kalogiropoulou’s idea of dystopia would look realistic, if it wasn’t for the sleekness of the film’s iconography, throbbing with lustful myths. The only woman allowed to train alongside men is a gun-waving Medusa with a stone-cold face and a grip as tight as theirs, but Gorgonà locates the meaning of dystopian living in queer desire, actualised, proving that the scariest thing to a man is not a woman, but two women. With guns.

– Savina Petkova

Director: Akio Fujimoto

Cinema is a tool for empathy, evidenced in the emotionally overwhelming response to The Voice of Hind Rajab, which won the Grand Jury Prize. Equally deserving of audience attention are the stories shared in Lost Land, the winner of the Orizzonti Jury Prize. A Japanese filmmaker dedicating his career to spotlighting unheard plights, Akio Fujimoto worked in close collaboration with the Rohingya people on this docufiction snapshot of two siblings who journey from a Bangladesh refugee camp to Malaysia, in search of a working relative. Shot by Evil Does Not Exist’s Yoshio Kitagawa, the film recalls Shinya Tsukamoto’s Shadow of Fire (2023) in its immersive perspective and quiet devastation.

– Blake Simons

Director: Damien Hauser

The year is 2094, and film director Kuve (Abraham Joseph) visits the African country of Umata to make a documentary about the aftermath of the ‘Great War’. Here he recruits a fellow filmmaker (Samson Waithaka) and an actress (Shandra Apondi). Challenged to create the documentary without AI, with three collaborators he embarks on the retelling of a tragic love affair; in so doing creating a spirited and witty discussion about the tangling of loss and love, imagination and technology. Damien Hauser’s Memory of Princess Mumbi is an exuberant argument that employs AI to boost its own futuristic production values even as it argues for the necessity for a human core to be maintained at the heart of storytelling. As well as being the first Kenyan film to make it to the Giornate degli Autori sidebar, it was one of the most original and exciting films I saw there.

– John Bleasdale

• Memory of Princess Mumbi screens at the 69th BFI London Film Festival

Director: David Pablos

Produced by Diego Luna, it’s easy to see why this Horizons-winning drama has earned comparisons to Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001). A road movie dripping with erotic tension, On the Road is anchored by drifter Veneno (Víctor Prieto), who goes through life seducing older truckers until a chance meeting sends him on a cross-country journey in search of long-buried secrets. David Pablos’s noir-infused queer thriller seesaws between the darkness of a night that exacerbates pulsating desires and the unmoving clarity of day, which comes to expose the gruelling face of violence. While not a flawless exercise, it’s one of striking execution. 

– Rafa Sales Ross

Director: Yanis Koussim

A mysterious car accident leaves a young father with amnesia as he returns to his home village with a bandaged face at the peak of Algeria’s civil war in 1993. In the present day, an elderly Muslim exorcist is thrust into a losing battle with Alzheimer’s disease as his disciple begins to fear that his demise may unleash long latent terror on their dwelling. Linking this diptych are shadowy visitors wreaking havoc with a gibberish language they whisper to the ears of the uninitiated.

This strikingly unsettling debut feature from Algerian filmmaker Yanis Koussim is one of the most accomplished Arab horrors ever made: a nightmarish vision of the lingering fears of the Algerian civil war (known as the Black Decade) that is part The Exorcist (1973) and part Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966). Realised with remarkable panache, the thematically rich Roqia is a foreboding treatise on collective trauma, repressed guilt and the lurking violence of the everyday.

– Joseph Fahim

Director: Cai Shangjun

Premiering the day before the awards ceremony, Cai Shangjun’s fourth feature focuses on the years after passion has first bloomed. In a muted and wounded love triangle, love turns to obligation for Meiyun (Best Actress winner Xin Zhilei) when her married lover Qifeng (Feng Shaofeng) gets her pregnant, but this is overshadowed by a sudden reunion with her terminally ill, estranged ex Baoshu (Zhang Songwen). Shangjun shoots the painful, resentful romance in dark, cluttered interiors that track Meiyun’s growing isolation and agony. The director upstaged more experienced filmmakers in competition with an unflinching story about an attempt to outweigh guilt with devotion.

– Rory Doherty