Sergei Loznitsa, speaking on the eve of the Venice film festival, called the European Commission's decision to terminate a €2 million grant to the Biennale Foundation "a punishment in kindergarten." [1] The cut followed Russia's return to its national pavilion. The money, the Biennale's own management said, paid for cinema, not for that pavilion. [1]

Loznitsa would "never ever" visit the Russian pavilion himself. He asked a different question. "Can the existence of this Russian pavilion stop this war or not?" [1] What he said he knew was the invoice. "In the second quarter of this year, European companies imported gas from Russia at unprecedented levels, and all that money goes straight into bombs that fall on Ukraine." [1] The EU's Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators recorded a 17 percent rise in European imports of Russian liquefied fossil gas against the same period in 2025, ahead of a full EU-wide ban in 2027. [1] "This is a much more serious issue than whether there is a Russian pavilion in Venice or not," he said. [1]

The Commission confirmed the termination in July after months of warnings. A spokesperson said cultural events funded by European taxpayers "should safeguard democratic values, foster open dialogue, diversity and freedom of expression — values which are not respected in today's Russia." [2] The Russian pavilion's exhibition, The Tree is Rooted in the Sky, was open only during the pre-opening vernissage and has been closed to the public since May 9. [1] The grant that vanished was not tied to those rooms.

Biennale management said the terminated money co-financed the cinema department's Biennale College and Venice Production Bridge, "activities and a department that have nothing to do with Russia's participation in the Biennale Arte." [1] Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale's president, accused the Commission of "abandoning our journey." The institution, he said, was engaged in "international research in the field of arts," not in politics. [1] The film festival has a degree of institutional independence from the art biennial. It still loses the grant. [1]

That is the gap the purity-test coverage misses. The velvet rope around a closed pavilion is the story art-world copy wants. The cinema school and the production market are the line items that actually disappear. Loznitsa, Belarus-born, Ukraine-raised, and now based in Germany, is showing Imperium out of competition on the Lido, a three-hour archival film built from Italian footage shot in the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1973 under KGB handlers. [1] The footage was meant to project unity, a sea of red flags and the anthem Wide is My Motherland. The farther the crew travels, Loznitsa said, the more the images refuse that unity. He compared the current pavilion to politburo portraits paraded by a small tractor through mud in Dagestan. "As propaganda, it's just so ridiculous." [1]

The festival around him is thick with Russia as subject, not as national stand. Alexandre Smia's Jupiter imagines a Russian president who survives an assassination attempt and blames Ukraine. Andrei Kutsila's Letters from the Silenced Country takes Belarus. Julia Loktev's five-hour My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile follows TV Rain journalists after they flee. [1] In one scene they are chastised for still saying "our army." "It's a film about when your country does terrible things, how to take accountability," Loktev said. [1]

The Ukrainian foreign ministry, meanwhile, raised "profound concern" over Ilya Khrzhanovsky's Dau. "Russia has long used culture as an instrument of state policy and hybrid warfare," the ministry said, a way "to legitimise its presence where tanks cannot reach." [1] It noted funding from Sergey Adonyev, sanctioned by the United States and Ukraine, and that protagonist Teodor Currentzis accepted Russian citizenship granted by Putin. [1] Alberto Barbera, the festival's artistic director, rejected the description of Dau as a "Kremlin-financed project." It "is not a Russian film; it is not pro-Putin propaganda," he said. "It is a film that denounces totalitarian regimes." [1] Directors at the film festival do not represent countries. Dau was funded by Germany, France, and Sweden. Imperium has support from Germany, Italy, France, and Lithuania. [1]

None of that restores the €2 million. None of it reduces the 17 percent. A reader who follows only the pavilion fight will think Brussels punished Russia in Venice. The cinema department that "has nothing to do with" the art pavilion is the one that lost the grant. The gas still moves.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin