Europe and the United States: two opposing universes depicted by two filmmakers, at once close and distant. Two seemingly disparate films – the delightfully poignant Made in EU by Bulgarian director Stephan Komandarev and the bourgeois, Woody Allen–style portrait After the Hunt by Luca Guadagnino – form a mirrored diptych on the fate of humanity, stranded on the shoals of Eurosceptic disenchantment and the struggles of American cultural elites. Around the drifting currents of individual consciousness, these two works employ different cinematic languages. On one side, a ‘warm’ neorealism tells the story of the zero case of Covid in Bulgaria, centered on a factory worker from the suburbs of Sofia, where low-cost, high-productivity textile companies flourish for the European market.
Komandarev constructs the film as a choral fresco in which Europe appears more as a brand than a political-institutional community – a label to display amid precarity and disillusionment. On the other side, Guadagnino’s film delves into the weary psychology of a closed microcosm: the American academic community, caught in the ethical dilemmas of a generational clash between Boomer professors and Gen Z students, who learn yet question authority.
At an elite New England college, a respected professor (Julia Roberts) finds herself at the centre of an explosive investigation. A model student (Ayo Edebiri) accuses a friend and colleague (Andrew Garfield) of inappropriate behaviour. As campus tension rises, a dark secret f...
Bahram is an Iranian-Azeri filmmaker marked by years of censorship and frustration: his films, shot in the northwest of the country, have never been granted permission to be screened. After yet another rejection, he decides to hop on a Vespa with his producer Sadaf and bring h...
The morally aporetic case of a philosophy teacher who, despite his vast knowledge, abuses a woke student becomes an allegorical tale of the political, social, and cultural situation that defines the country today. Made in EU, presented in the Venezia Spotlight section, explores the gap between the founding values of the European project and their concrete translation into lives marked by illusions of progress.
After the Hunt, screened Out of Competition, transforms the university world into an allegory of the polis: a place where knowledge should signify emancipation, but instead becomes an arena of suspicion, manipulation, and betrayal. Symbolically, the Bulgarian film stages an ‘external’ Europe, observed from the margins: collective bodies and destinies reflecting the periphery of the community’s dream. Guadagnino, by contrast, depicts an ‘internal’ and ‘interned’ America under the pressures of presidential power and the demeaning logic of money – a laboratory of neuroses revealing the fragility of Enlightenment principles when knowledge loses its ethical function, when neuroses, selfishness, and greed overpower a humanity that knows much, even in philosophy, but applies little of what it knows.
