Venice Film Festival 2025: Remake, Our Land, Kim Novak’s Vertigo | Festive and awards

Venice had a remarkable non-fiction share of its 2025 program, including new films by Werner Herzog and Laura Poitras (both covered here). Venice programmers do not fall for generic documentaries shaped by anecdotes told by Talking Heads, leaning on projects that say as much about their creators as their subjects. Ross Mcelwee, Lucrecia Martel and Alexandre O. Philippe use their history, their interests and even their faults to tell their last stories, and all are worth it. We will even break your heart.

Ross MCELWEE has long put itself at the center of his films, whether it is his search for romance in his breakthrough “Sherman’s March” or a chronicle of his complex father / son relationship in “photographic memory”. With its masterful “Remake,” MCELWEE documents a formative chapter of his life, while he was working on an adaptation of “March” in a narrative characteristic (and later a television series), all that shaped by the death of his son, Adrian. A filmmaker of all his life, Ross has hundreds of hours of Adrian’s sequences during his existence, some of them apparently recorded if Adrian loved him or not. MCELWEE does not only tell the story of his son’s problems with dependence and depression; He wonders if he made it enough and even the role that the camera (and the renown associated in places such as the Venice Film Festival) played in history.

As a person who recently was 50 years old with three sons heading for high school and college, “Remake” struck a powerful emotional agreement. I could see my boys in the young Adrian and wondered how I would continue even if something happened to one of my children, even less to make a film about it. There is courage in the “remake” and something that ultimately looks like an act of self-service. Ross Mcelwee had to make this film to treat what happened to him and Adrian. However, he does not put pressure for an over-explanation, other than undoubtedly in his anger against the drug crisis, entering this nation.

Most of the time, he seems melancholy, uncertain and which almost gropes what he wants to express. This aspect actually gives a “remake” a large part of its power because it makes it more personal. In a sense, it is like a praise, something that earns more power through his emotional breaks even if his grammar is not perfect. Sometimes he does not speak of Adrian but has He, using “you” as if his son could hear him. I hope he can.

There is also a haunted atmosphere in Lucrecia Martel “Our land,” Also known as “benchmarks” and “chocobar” in several years, it was in production. This project by the director of transcendent “Zama” has been her obsession for some time, because she has spent years looking for and shaping a story that is part of the drama of the courtroom, a partly historical study and partly comments on colonization. It would seem once much longer, we can see the difficulty that Martel had to find precisely the good story here, especially in a second hour which could be called a winding. However, cinema is undeniably powerful, graceful and moving, a reminder of its remarkable skills as a creator.

The community of Chuschagasta in northwest Argentina is an indigenous population which has been reduced and destroyed during generations. In 2009, a leader in this community named Javier Chocobar was shot dead while trying to keep a local land owner and two former police officers off the field. There are video sequences of the incident, and a large part of “Nuestra Tierra” recreated this fateful day. It took almost a decade for men accused of this crime to be judged, and testimonies on what happened on this fateful day constitutes the essential of Martel’s film, itself a fascinating study in cinema, since the images which inspired it to make this film in the first place are debated. Does the camera tell the whole story?

Martel spun in the second half of the film to tell more stories about history, people and landing at the center of the case. She loves to obtain a drone above this magnificent plot of earth, moving slowly on and on her to capture her distant beauty. Sometimes he has the impression that Martel tries to tell too many stories at the same time, giving the film the air of something that could have worked better on television or a longer form. On the one hand, it is a story of bureaucracy, corruption and murder; On the other hand, it is also a story of people erased from history, an attempt to recover their story before it is forgotten.

There is also a feeling of telling a story while we can still hear it in Alexandre O. Philippe “Vertigo by Kim Novak,” A film that looks like an act of love by the director of “78/52” and “Lynch / Oz”. The man who has spent so many years dissecting the process passes from directors to one of the most emblematic artists who has ever experienced, using “vertigo” as a centerpiece of Novak’s life, slightly slightly previous, but really allowing a private and accomplished woman to discuss his job in a way that other filmmakers never allow.

Philippe Filme Novak with incredible grace and respect, allowing him to talk about his process of “reacting” instead of “playing” and the choices it made during “vertigo”. The title is not accidental, and there is something fascinating to look at a filmmaker who focused on directors also embrace the actor process, especially in the context of a filmmaker who often gets all the merit of his works. “Vertigo” was also from Kim Novak. Don’t forget.