Venice 2025 (August 27-September 6) British ‘Ish’ to feature, while two Indian women directors make a mark…

A film set in Luton, loneliness and desire in Mumbai, and Uttarakhand, respectively, are among the subjects contained in these films, heading to The Lido – the island where screenings take place – an emerging Pakistani-born director also has a short film…

by Tatiana Rosenstein

A DEBUT film by British artist-filmmaker Imran Perretta and two Indian features both directed by women will be hitting Venice shortly.

Featuring as part of Venice Critics’ Week, Perretta brings his feature debut , ‘Ish’ (pictured above).

Shot in luminous black-and-white, the film follows two best friends in Luton whose bond is broken by a traumatic police stop-and-search.

Perretta, drawing on his own teenage years, turns the coming-of-age drama into a meditation on identity, masculinity, and surveillance in post-9/11 Britain.

Backed by BBC Film and co-written with acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh, ‘Ish’ is already tipped as a deeply personal and political love letter to a town too often maligned.

From India, Anuparna Roy’s ‘Songs of Forgotten Trees’ features in the Orizzonti/Horizons section.

This is a raw portrait of two migrant women in Mumbai whose fragile friendship grows out of barter, silence and survival.

Actress Naaz Shaikh plays Thooya, an aspiring actress juggling beauty and compromise, while Sumi Baghel is Swetha, a wary professional who shares her flat.

Roy, who financed much of the film herself while working three jobs, wanted to tell the stories that mainstream cinema ignores.

Presented by Anurag Kashyap (‘Kennedy’), whose own ‘Bandar’ heads to Toronto International Film Festival (September 4-14) ,‘Songs of Forgotten Trees’ promises to challenge easy Bollywood clichés and paint Mumbai as a living, breathing organism of deferred dreams.

If Roy’s film speaks to survival in the city, Nidhi Saxena takes us to the mountains.

Her ‘Secret of a Mountain Serpent’ will open Venice’s Biennale College programme, and she has already made history as the first Indian woman ever to win the Biennale College award (it is her second feature and she is already developing her third).

The prize comes with €200,000 (£173K) in production support — the same award that once helped launch Shubhashish Bhutiani’s acclaimed ‘Hotel Salvation’ (‘Mukti Bhavan’) in 2016.

That film, interestingly, also starred Adil Hussain — the very actor who anchors Saxena’s story here as the enigmatic Manik Guho.

Set in Uttarakhand during the Kargil War, Saxena’s film follows Barkha (Trimala Adhikari), a teacher whose husband is away fighting.

Left behind with other women in the village, she encounters Manik, a stranger whose presence awakens long-suppressed desires.

Drawing on local legend of a snake deity who waits for a promised bride, Saxena turns myth into a metaphor for yearning and awakening.

The film is co-produced by Sri Lanka’s Vimukthi Jayasundara, the winner of Cannes Camera D’Or, with Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal (who were behind the much acclaimed ‘Girls Will Be Girls’ last year) also lending weight as executive producers. It’s exactly the kind of daring and poetic cinema the Biennale College strand was designed to champion — and now it carries an Indian female voice at the forefront.

From the US, comes Shehrezad Maher’s short ‘The Curfew’, about a boy caring for his grandmother while colonial ghosts haunt their silences. Starring Indo-Canadian veteran Balinder Johal, known for Deepa Mehta’s ‘Heaven on Earth’ and ‘Beeba Boys’, as well as television work on ‘Yellowjackets’. Her presence gives the short film a recognizable gravitas that festival audience will note.

Venice Classics adds an essential reminder of where Indian cinema’s global journey began. Bimal Roy’s ‘Do Bigha Zamin’ (‘Two Acres of Land’, 1953), restored by the Film Heritage Foundation in collaboration with Criterion.

Starring Balraj Sahni and Nirupa Roy, the story of a poor farmer forced off his land and reduced to pulling a rickshaw in Calcutta was one of the first Indian films to gain international recognition. It won the International Prize at Cannes in 1954 and was hailed by critics for fusing Italian neo-realism with Indian social realities. The glamorous story behind it is that Sahni, trained in London, threw himself into the role by actually working as a rickshaw puller in the city to understand the humiliation and toil.

This year there is also Thai director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s ‘Human Resource’. Known for ‘Fast & Feel Love’ and ‘Happy Old Year’, Nawapol this time examines the global decline in birth rates through the intimate frame of a female HR executive interviewing job applicants.

Elsewhere, there is plenty of global filmmaking firepower on show – Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix-backed ‘Frankenstein’, Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Bugonia’ with Emma Stone, Benny Safdie’s ‘The Smashing Machine’ with Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, and Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ lead the charge…

Luca Guadagnino unveils ‘After the Hunt’ with Julia Roberts, making her first appearance on the Venice red carpet.

Netflix looks set to dominate Venice once again with three major competition titles, while the arthouse platform; Mubi arrives in force with Paolo Sorrentino’s opener ‘La Grazia’; Jim Jarmusch’s ensemble ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’ and Korean Park Chan-wook’s new feature, ‘No Other Choice’.

Add to that Sofia Coppola’s documentary on Marc Jacobs; a British production ‘Broken English’ on Marianne Faithfull starring Tilda Swinton; and Gus Van Sant’s hostage drama ‘Dead Man’s Wire’ with Bill Skarsgård and Al Pacino, the Lido will have no shortage of glitter.

Two-time Oscar winner Alexander Payne heads the international jury that will decide this year’s Golden Lion – the top award for the best film screening at this year’s Venezia 82 (#BiennaleCinema2025).

Just announced today: Francis Ford (‘The Godfather’) and previous Golden Lion award winner will present Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award to Werner Herzog at the opening on August 27. Mike Figgis’ ‘Megadoc’ about the making of Coppola’s latest film, ‘Megalopolis’ will screen at the festival, while Herzog’s latest documentary, ‘Ghost’ will screen out of competition on August 28. (SR)

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