For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship-a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil's abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. In Mendonça's work, memory functions as a tool of defiance.
"Fire of Wind" is a movie of images, and its attention to light and shadow, to the texture of faces and of tree bark, of foliage and terrain, is among the most careful and most daring that I've ever seen. (Mateus and Vítor Carvalho did the cinematography.) Although "Fire of Wind" is drastically different from other films in recent release, it nonetheless harks back to a venerable tradition in political filmmaking.
About two dozen movies have topped the box office in 2025, and it's safe to say that Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is the only one that depicts its protagonists freeing arrested immigrants from detention centers. The movie doesn't face much competition for the title of most political weekend-topper of the year; superhero pictures such as Captain America: Brave New World perpetually tell the most anodyne stories possible, even when they're supposedly about Washington-based conspiracies;
But the films themselves struck a different note. Jury president Alexander Payne may have rebutted questions about current affairs during his opening press conference, declaring himself concerned only with discussing cinema, but cinema at Venice this year was concerned largely, it turned out, with discussing current events. The big hits of the festival were both nailbiting ticking-clock stories directed by women that tackled real-world situations of such tragedy and magnitude that many people shy from discussing them, let alone make a movie about them.
