Fragments for Venus Explores Motherhood, Margins, and Radical Simplicity in Diop’s Most Personal Work Yet
Miu Miu has tapped acclaimed French filmmaker Alice Diop to direct Fragments for Venus, the 30th installment in its long-running Women’s Tales film series. The short will premiere on August 30 during Venice Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori section.
“I’ve been making films from the margins, with a political intention of filming those margins, because those are the people I come from. That’s my territory, my history,” said Diop. “Fragments for Venus is an essential film to make at this time. It is my most simple and radical work to date.”
Known for her powerful documentaries that center France’s immigrant and working-class communities, Diop’s work blends formal rigor with urgent social commentary. After earning a master’s degree in history from the Pantheon-Sorbonne and studying visual sociology, Diop joined La Fémis where she began developing a lens rooted in lived experience. Her early films, such as La Tour du monde (2006) and Les Sénégalaises et la Sénégauloise (2007), explored her upbringing in Aulnay-sous-Bois and the complex intersections of family, race, and identity.
Her 2016 documentary La Permanence, set in a hospital ward for undocumented immigrants, won international acclaim for its restrained and compassionate portrait of displacement and care. In Nous (2021), Diop traced France’s social geography via the RER B train line, weaving together lives from the suburbs to the city center, a film that went on to win multiple awards at the Berlinale.
With her 2022 fiction debut Saint Omer, Diop achieved critical breakthrough, earning the Silver Lion, Lion of the Future, and France’s Oscar submission. Inspired by a real-life infanticide trial, the film confronts themes of justice, migration, and motherhood. Director Céline Sciamma praised it as “a cinema poem,” noting its kinship with Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.
Diop continues to expand the possibilities of storytelling both onscreen and off. In 2021, she launched an “Ideal Cinematheque of the Suburbs of the World” in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and Ateliers Médicis, curating films that reframe suburban narratives with artistic nuance and complexity.
Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales, now in its 15th year, remains the longest-running short film commission platform led by women directors. Each film offers a standalone vision informed by the filmmaker’s unique voice and perspective. Over the years, the series has featured work by Ava DuVernay, Agnes Varda, Chloë Sevigny, Haifaa al-Mansour, and Lucrecia Martel, among others.
Fragments for Venus joins this lineage as a work described by Diop as both stripped down and radical, channeling her signature themes of marginality and emotion into a new cinematic form.
The film will debut at Venice ahead of a global release online.