There's a strange kind of silence that falls when Laura Poitras makes her move. Not the kind engineered by PR reps or embargoes, but the old-school kind—earned through trust, guarded rooms, and an instinct for when to shut up and just watch.
Word is, she's bringing a new documentary to the Venice Film Festival competition this year. No title. No subject. No whisper of what she's spent the past two years working on. Just a ripple through the industry that caught even the best-connected by surprise.
That doesn't happen anymore. Not really.
In a landscape where festival slates leak out in half-baked scoops and ego-driven “exclusives,” Poitras has managed to do what used to be standard practice: finish a film without anyone knowing. That, in itself, feels like a quiet rebellion.
Of course, Poitras isn't new to the Lido. In 2022, she rolled in with All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a wrenching profile of Nan Goldin's campaign against the Sackler family and the blood-money fueling American art institutions. It won the Golden Lion. Only the second documentary to do so in the festival's 80-year history.
That win wasn't sentimental. It was a line in the sand. Alberto Barbera and his Venice selection committee were saying, in effect: we still have a spine. In a time when most festivals are grasping at streaming deals and star power, Venice gave its highest honor to a film about grief, justice, and the cost of memory.
And now—just three years later—Poitras is back.
What do we know? Nothing. What do we suspect? A lot.
Her career hasn't exactly courted the middle. Citizenfour exposed NSA surveillance. Risk took a far less worshipful look at Julian Assange than his fanbase expected. All the Beauty wielded elegance like a scalpel. She doesn't make “issue” documentaries—she dissects systems. And if this new film is being handled with such secrecy, one can only assume it's loaded.
Here's a detail the festival press releases won't touch: back in 2022, during the same festival circuit that crowned her with the Golden Lion, Poitras publicly called out Venice and TIFF for inviting Hillary Clinton to promote her AppleTV+ docuseries Gutsy. She accused them of whitewashing. Of giving a platform to power, unchallenged.
It caused a stir. Then it faded. But there's a bit of dry irony in the fact that Poitras—who made noise about the industry's moral hygiene—may now be invited back to the very same red carpets she once criticized.
Call it hypocrisy. Or call it history. Either way, she's earned the right to walk through that door again.
There's a temptation to speculate—about the topic, the scope, the politics. But maybe it's better we don't. Let the film speak. Let the screening room go dark before we all light the torches of online interpretation.
Because here's what matters: in 2025, Laura Poitras has once again made something. And she's bringing it to the most serious platform left in the film world. No teaser tweets. No Netflix logo. Just film.
That's the only surprise we still need.
