Venice Screens the Exile That Europe Debates

While the political pages of Europe's newspapers debate visa restrictions and return hubs, the Venice Film Festival has offered a different kind of testimony. Le Monde reports on Julia Loktev's documentary 'My Undesirable Friends', which follows Russian journalists forced to flee their country but who continue to report on the war in Ukraine from precarious exile. The film, we are told, has moved audiences at the Lido.

The coincidence is not trivial. The Guardian reports that Germany is urging the EU to tighten tourist visas for Russian citizens, following an alleged sabotage attempt linked to a Belarusian who held an Italian-issued visa. Here, in the space of a single week, the world's coverage of Italy contains both the human face of Russian exile and the security anxieties that exile provokes. Venice, as so often, becomes the stage where Europe's contradictions are performed.

Italy's role in this drama is ambiguous. The visa in question was issued by Italian authorities, a reminder that the country is a gateway — for tourists, for migrants, and now for the security concerns of its northern neighbours. Yet Venice also offers a platform for Russian voices of conscience, those who have fled the regime that Europe seeks to contain. The same nation that grants visas is the one that screens the stories of those who escaped.

The foreign press tends to treat these as separate stories: one about security, another about culture. But seen from our pages, they are two sides of the same Mediterranean coin. Italy is the border where Europe's policies meet their human consequences, and where the stories of those consequences are first told. The festival's red carpets and the chancelleries' negotiations are closer than they appear.

We would suggest that the world's coverage of Italy would benefit from holding these two images together: the journalist in exile, and the visa officer stamping a passport. Between them lies the real question of what Europe wishes to be — a fortress or a refuge, a community of values or a union of interests. Venice, as ever, provides the screen on which that question is projected.