Last year the Venice Film Festival was impacted by the striking The Voice of Hind, which mixed fictional scenes and the real voice of a Palestinian girl to denounce the genocide in Gaza. Kaouther Ben Hania's film ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize, and it wouldn't be surprising if history repeated itself this year with Naza, the documentary in which Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor expose the war crimes committed by their country's army during the Gaza War. Although it must be said that, beyond the rigorous exploration of the methods employed by the Israel Defense Forces, Naza manages to transcend the denunciation of war barbarism, and offers a lucid and terrifying portrait of the most sinister face of the contemporary world, marked by the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the most basic notions of empathy, democracy and humanity.

Thirty-four years after presenting Jamón, jamón, by Bigas Luna, at the Venice Film Festival, the couple formed by Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz has returned to walk the red carpet of the Italian event for the premiere of Bunker, the new work by the French playwright and filmmaker Florian Zeller. This is the seventh time that the Spanish acting couple has shared the big screen. In this case, they play a married couple consisting of a successful architect and an editor. The couple lives in London, with their two daughters, in a privileged situation, a “comfort” that seems to have shattered the woman's existential well-being. This unstable situation is jolted by the appearance of a technology tycoon who offers the architect the construction of a bunker in Hawaii.

If there is a director who has known how to delve into the existence of the forgotten, those expelled by society, it is Werner Herzog. The Munich filmmaker has built, throughout his prodigious and eclectic career, a family of characters who, by force or by their own will, have found their place on the margins, far from customs, beyond what is accepted or tolerated. This Thursday the Venice Film Festival hosted the world premiere of Bucking bastard, a film that presents two new essential figures of the Herzog universe: Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters who speak, walk, dream, and fall in love in unison. The characters are inspired by twin sisters Freda and Greta Chaplin –who gained notoriety in the 1980s for their peculiar synchronicity and their problems with the law–, but in Venice, Herzog has assured that Bucking bastard “is a work of fiction”.

The Venice Film Festival has kicked off its 83rd edition with a calculated combination of glamour, authorship, entertainment, and critical spirit. The elegance and media appeal were provided by George Clooney, who received an honorary Golden Lion this Wednesday. Curiously, last year Clooney was already seen receiving an award for his career in Venice, but it was on the festival's screens, in the fiction of Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach's film. In reality, the link between the Hollywood star and the Festival dates back a long way, since 1998, when Clooney was still part of the cast of Emergencies, the actor stepped onto the festival's red carpet to present A very dangerous mess next to Jennifer Lopez. “My love story with Venice is almost thirty years old, and my most precious memory was my wedding – in 2014, with Amal Alamuddin, at the luxurious Aman Grand Canal Hotel. If I don't say this, I could get in trouble at home,” Clooney commented to the accredited press, showing off a charming and mischievous smile.