Venice 2026: The Rich, the Powerful, and the Cost of Looking Away

Solid but soft was the general consensus about this year’s competition films at the Venice Film Festival. A handful of titles (Ink, Wild Horse Nine, Bucking Fastard) dazzled in the first few days, with mostly diminishing returns plus a few arresting standouts over the following week. The real star of Venice has been the documentary lineup, ambitious and urgent warnings about the state of the world. And the best films, both fiction and non-fiction, all share the same message: The powerful are crushing the powerless — at their own peril.

Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, his first film since 2018’s acclaimed Burning, is among the strongest entries in competition, a quiet but bracing 164-minute exploration of the relationship between affluent documentarian Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and working-class wife Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon). Ye-ji, whose generational-wealth husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) drives a Porsche and wraps her in luxury, wants to document the effects of corporate restructuring, and approaches Mi-ok about filming her laid-off welder husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu).

Humiliated by his lack of employment and traumatized by the physical harm he suffered during a brutal police crackdown of a union protest, Ho-seok drinks heavily to numb his emotional and physical pain. Ye-ji, genuinely concerned for the couple’s plight—but also hungry for an impactful documentary subject — wins over the desperately lonely Mi-ok through a series of interviews. And, after a few shared meals with their spouses, eventually persuades Ho-seok to open up.

What makes Possible Love so impressive are the subtle slights and insurmountable rifts between the film’s rich and poor, the tense dynamic between both well-meaning couples that inexorably leads to tragedy. Embarrassment curdles into shame, privilege unavoidably taints empathy, and a documentary project meant to enlighten only flattens its subjects into melodrama. Lee’s gentle style belies the bitter truth of his haunting story, made even more poignant by the tender but tenuous kinship between Ye-ji and Mi-ok.

Economic anxiety is a recurring theme this year, especially in Florian Zeller’s didactic but potent Bunker. A literal windows-not-walls plea for tolerance, the star vehicle features real-life Oscar-winning husband and wife duo Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem as a married Spanish couple living in London whose professional ambitions strain their otherwise loving longtime relationship. Sofia (Cruz) is a translator at a British publishing house who gave up her career goals in Madrid in deference to her husband Miguel (Bardem), a celebrated architect now being offered a fortune to design an underground bunker for a social-media tech billionaire (Paul Dano in Mark Zuckerberg cosplay).

The project rattles Miguel, but the money is seductive — as is the opportunity to build a modern-day pharaonic temple. Sofia, though, is disgusted that a billionaire who made his fortune ostensibly connecting people wants to seal himself away from humanity over fears that today’s income inequality will inevitably lead to economic collapse and a kill-the-rich civil war. Meanwhile, Miguel keeps getting more and more paranoid that his affluent townhouse will be broken into by the resentful victims of the area’s gentrification — especially his next-door neighbor Toby (Stephen Graham), who sledgehammers through their shared brick-and-plaster property-line partition so he can let more light into his shed.

Tensions flare between Miguel and Sofia, leading up to an extended two-hander scene where Bardem and Cruz offer up virtuosic performances laying bare the raw emotions roiling their marriage. It’s an impressive feat from writer-director Zeller that deeply personalizes the political, which is somewhat compromised by a mildly sensationalistic climax hammering home an eventual why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along message promoting community and connection. No more bunker mentalities, people!

That said, it’s hard not to despair after seeing Alex Gibney’s four-hour Musk, a shit-your-pants exposé of near-trillionaire industrialist Elon Musk. His dense documentary reveals him as a stock-manipulating charlatan more than willing to compromise morality in exchange for obscene amounts of money and political influence that might even lead to data-scraping vote manipulation in the upcoming midterm election. And it’s difficult to shake the parallels to free speech censorship in Trump’s America after watching Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends—Part Two: Exile, the sobering six-hour sequel to her riveting six-hour 2025 documentary about dissident Russian journalists working outside of their homeland despite persistent death threats from Putin’s oppressive government.

But by far the most depressing, and enraging, documentary at Venice this week is also the only non-fiction title selected for competition: NAZA, a late-entry title produced by British newspaper The Guardian and directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the filmmakers behind 2025 Oscar-winner No Man’s Land. Announced at the last minute and unspooling only a few days before the festival ends, NAZA is an acronym that Israel intelligence forces use to describe collateral damage in wartime attacks. And in chilling interviews with two dozen Israeli intelligence whistle-blowers (shot on rooftops in Tel Aviv at night and with vocal manipulation to obscure their subjects’ identity) the film lays out the case that Israel’s intentional disregard for human lives in its deadly ongoing pursuit of Hamas soldiers in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.

“We called it peace thwarting,” one operative says. “The goal was quantity, not quality,” says another. The Israelis deliberately flattened entire neighborhoods, building by building, in what they themselves describe as an “erasing of history.”  One explains how they hacked a 12-year-old girl’s phone to look for phrases like “daddy” and “return” to justify bombing a Hamas soldier’s apartment and wiping out his entire family along with him. Another admits that they killed as many as 500 civilians in a single strike, in areas that they called “annihilation zones.”

They watched dogs eating dead Palestinian bodies. They saw Israeli snipers killing off starving people on a food line crossing a bridge. “Do you think it’s a genocide?” asks co-director Abraham. “Yes,” his informant tells him. “Completely.” Another is even more blunt. “NAZA is intentional killing,” he explains.

The kicker is an old television clip of a young Benjamin Netanyahu, long before his current and controversial reign as Prime Minister of Israel, promoting his 1986 book Terrorism: How the West Can Win. Interviewer William F. Buckley, Jr asks him to define his topic. “It’s the systematic attack of innocent people for political gains,” he says. How terrifyingly ironic.