By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
On the eve of the Venice Film Festival, one of Ukraine's most acclaimed filmmakers has taken aim at Brussels, not Moscow, for the latest flashpoint in the culture-war fallout from Russia's invasion.
Sergei Loznitsa criticized the European Commission's decision to pull €2 million in funding from the Venice Biennale after the Biennale allowed Russia to reopen its national pavilion for the first time since 2022, according to The Guardian. Loznitsa compared the funding cut to "a punishment in kindergarten," a jab suggesting the move was more symbolic scolding than serious policy.
The pavilion decision itself drew heavy criticism this past spring, The Guardian reports, when the Biennale's organizers opened the door to Russian participation despite the ongoing full-scale war. That controversy has now boomeranged back onto the EU's own funding relationship with the Biennale, caught between competing pressures: punishing an institution seen as too accommodating to Moscow, and the risk of looking like it is policing artistic institutions over geopolitics.
What's notable here is that the criticism comes from a Ukrainian filmmaker himself, not a Russian sympathizer crying censorship. Loznitsa's films have chronicled Soviet and post-Soviet history and the war's toll on Ukraine; his objection is procedural as much as principled, that yanking money after the fact reads as theater rather than accountability.
No details on the size of the Biennale's remaining budget or whether the cut affects this year's film festival programming were included in the available reporting, so those practical stakes remain, for now, an open question the festival itself will have to answer as it opens.
Loved it, hated it, or wasted my afternoon, here's which.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
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