Venice 25

The Dutch/Afghan filmmaker discusses his riveting new documentary, world-premiering in Venice, which immerses the audience in the daily lives of a young Taliban solider and his teenage brother. “My film depicts the effect of war on people,” says Amini. “Not only the war in Afghanistan, it's the war everywhere. War is not only destructive for cities, buildings, houses, hospitals and roads. It also destroys the souls of people generation after generation after generation.”

Paris-based distributor Astrea has acquired international rights to the VR title A Long Goodbye, directed by Kate Voet & Victor Maes. The animated interactive film tells the story of Ida, a 72-year-old pianist living with dementia, and will celebrate its world premiere in Venice Immersive competition. “A Long Goodbye is a poetic experience about the impact of dementia, but above all it is about love,” write the filmmakers.

Leading Argentine director Lucrecia Martel takes the plunge into documentary with her latest feature, a complex and hard-hitting story about the murder of an Indigenous community leader and the community’s subsequent fight for justice on his behalf. “It is very important to convey to young people that filmmaking and cinema can have a huge power,” Martel tells Business Doc Europe. “They can use it for good or bad reasons but it has a huge power - and I’ve never felt it so much as in this film.”

The 82nd Venice FF will host the first Golden Globes Impact Prize for Documentary. The winning doc will be selected based on its social importance, journalistic integrity, artistic creativity, and narrative disruption. Nominations include Kabul Between Prayers (Aboozar Amini), Nuestra Tierra (Lucrecia Martel), and Cover-Up by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. The 82nd Venice FF runs August 27 to September 9.

In the hybrid film Memory, Vladlena Sandu, a survivor of the war in Chechnya, studies her traumatic memories in order to transcend and transform them via cinema. “The bad memories, I have a chance to look at them - and I feel myself more calm,” she explains to Business Doc Europe how it helps her to confront the demons from her childhood through her art. Her hope with her filmmaking is to try to break “the circle of violence” that has for so long surrounded her.

Jihan K’s father Mansur Rashid Kikhia was a human rights lawyer, Libya’s foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations. But he was also opposed to then-Libyan leader Colonel Qaddafi. Mansur disappeared on a trip to Cairo in 1993 while attending a human rights conference. Director Jihan was six when her father went missing. “I'm dealing with a real existential crisis where my father is stuck in the dream realm,” she tells BDE. “The film is a tool to make something concrete out of my father, to create a portrait of my father.”

Folk comes to the Lido September 5 in Robert Gordon and Joe Lauro’s story of the Newport Folk Festival, which was a hot bed of political radicalism and musical evolution in the early 1960s. Featuring the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and John Lee Hooker, it's a film made for theatrical exhibition, the filmmakers argue. “In Venice, we will play to a 1400-seat theatre, and that's the size of some of the Newport stages!”

Directors Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard talk to Business Doc Europe about their hybrid documentary featuring the late Marianne Faithfull. “Consistently over the years, she has been lucid and witty and unsuffering of fools, and has stood up for her own work…I think she'd have really enjoyed the way in which all of these versions of herself over the years, participate actively in the film.”

An enthralling, illuminating and warm-hearted examination of the life and work of a woman who was self-aware of her image and abilities, but who defied the expectations of the tinsel town system, ultimately charting her own course away from the movie world.

He may have been sentenced in absentia to eight and a half years in jail by the Russian authorities, but Ukrainian producer and director Alexander Rodnyansky continues to work while in exile in LA, where he made his new feature documentary world premiering at Venice 2025. “It is a story of an unending conflict but of a deep, enduring hope that one day the war will end,” he tells Business Doc Europe. “This is what the film is about. I believe this experience is shared by many, many families around the globe.”