Since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, the Venice Film Festival has featured almost no films by directors connected to Russia. There had been a nominal exception before: last year, the premiere of Canadian documentarian Anastasia Trofimova’s “Russians at War” sparked a major scandal.
In 2025, that situation changed somewhat. New works by Alexander Sokurov and Alexander Rodnyansky are being screened in Venice outside the main competition.
At the same time, the Giornate degli Autori program is presenting the debuts of two young women filmmakers.
The first is Crimea-born Vladlena Sandu, whose film “Memory” centers on a childhood spent in Chechnya during the First Chechen War.
The second is Bakur Bakuradze’s student Nastya Korkiya with the film “Short Summer”. In her work, the Chechen war becomes a constant, oppressive backdrop to the summer holiday of an eight-year-old girl. The crackling radios heard in the film refer to the conflict only as an anti-terrorist operation by Russian troops.
The editors note that more detailed coverage of the films by Sandu and Korkiya will appear in upcoming reports from Venice.