Every single year, the festival circuit turns into a moral playground where artistic merit takes a back seat to geopolitical point-scoring. Venice just pulled the stunt again, sliding the Gaza documentary NAZA into its main competition lineup. The lazy consensus from the cultural commentariat is simple: bravery, activism on screen, cinema speaking truth to power.
That narrative is a comforting, self-serving fairy tale. It treats films not as works of art that must stand or fall on cinematic execution, but as cheap proxies for UN resolutions.
I have spent decades watching prestige festivals compromise their own curatorial standards to chase tomorrow morning’s front-page headlines. When you elevate a movie primarily because of the nationality or the immediate suffering of its subjects, you are not championing cinema. You are exploiting human misery for a red-carpet photo-op.
Let us be brutally honest about how this machine works. Venice does not select a film like NAZA because its cinematography redefines visual grammar, or because its editing structures time in a way that alters human perception. They select it because the artistic director wants to field questions at a press conference about the Middle East instead of camera lenses, framing, or pacing. It is a cynical calculation masquerading as moral courage.
The Trap of Victimhood as a Quality Metric
Here is the dirty secret of modern festival curation: victimhood has become a substitute for aesthetic rigor.
If a director points a camera at an active war zone, critics immediately suspend their critical faculties. To criticize the structure, the bias, or the sheer aesthetic monotony of the project is framed as moral failure. This is a trap. Art does not get a free pass just because the stakes in the documentary's background are life and death. In fact, when the stakes are that high, sloppy filmmaking is a moral failure in its own right.
Imagine a scenario where a Hollywood studio releases a bloated, poorly written action flick about a real-world humanitarian crisis, using tragedy as cheap window dressing for explosions. Critics would eviscerate it for exploitation. Yet, when an indie doc does the exact same thing with talking heads and raw B-roll, festival juries hand it trophies to prove how deeply they care about the state of the world.
That is hypocrisy.
The Venice Film Festival was created to celebrate the cinema as an autonomous art form—a medium of light, shadow, rhythm, and performance that transcends immediate political squabbles. When Alberto Barbera and his selection committee program films as diplomatic interventions, they destroy the very autonomy that makes cinema worth defending.
The Myth of the Activist Lens
We are told that a documentary like NAZA serves as an urgent witness. Witnessing is important, but journalism and documentary filmmaking are not the same thing. Journalism values immediacy, verification, and geopolitical context. Cinema values permanence, psychological truth, and emotional resonance.
When you mash them together into a 90-minute festival entry, you usually get neither good reporting nor great art. You get a polemic designed to make European socialites weep into their champagne glasses before heading off to a private dinner in the Lido.
Look at the track record of past politically charged selections at major European festivals. How many of those films are actually watched, studied, or revered five years later? Almost none. They serve their purpose for exactly four days in September or May, generating social media outrage and self-righteous op-eds, before sinking into the streaming abyss once the news cycle shifts to the next atrocity.
This is not preservation of culture. It is disposable emotional tourism.
What Real Artistic Courage Looks Like
Real artistic courage is making a quiet, difficult film about human nature that has no obvious geopolitical hook, yet manages to expose something profound about why we destroy each other. Real courage is rejecting the temptation to rely on ripped-from-the-headlines misery porn to command an audience's attention.
When festivals reward topicality over craft, they send a toxic message to young filmmakers across the globe: Do not bother mastering your medium. Just point your lens at a burning building, and we will put you in competition.
That destroys industries. It bankrupts local film cultures by convincing regional funding bodies that they only need to back trauma narratives if they want international distribution. It turns complex human cultures into flat, two-dimensional symbols of suffering.
We need to stop praising Venice for this maneuver. It is not brave. It is lazy curation hiding behind a shield of moral intimidation.
If a film deserves to be in competition at the world's oldest and most prestigious festival, it should earn its place on the screen, frame by agonizing frame, not through a press release issued by a committee terrified of being labeled indifferent.
Stop confusing the urgency of a news ticker with the permanence of great art.
