MIU MIU WOMEN’S TALES #30 PRESENTS ALICE DIOP’S FRAGMENTS OF VENUS

editor MAREK BARTEK

At this year’s Venice Film Festival, Miu Miu unveiled the thirtieth chapter of its Women’s Tales series. Fragments for Venus by French filmmaker Alice Diop premiered as part of the Giornate degli Autori programme alongside Joanna Hogg’s Autobiografia di una Borsetta. The short film continues the house’s long-standing project of inviting female directors to reimagine femininity through their own lens.

images: courtesy of MIU MIU

Diop, whose 2022 feature Saint Omer earned Venice’s Grand Jury Prize, takes a deeply poetic approach here. In Fragments for Venus, a Black woman wanders through a museum, tracing centuries of Western art and the positions in which Black female bodies have been placed. Parallel scenes in Brooklyn show another woman walking through the streets, encountering Black women as living embodiments of a new Venus. The film draws on Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), a text that catalogues centuries of depictions of the Black female form, and transforms this history into a gesture of repair, joy and self-celebration.

image: courtesy of MIU MIU

“There is calm in the way this short film proceeds, which is a political gesture,” Diop explains. Her film blends influences from Claudia Rankine to Saidiya Hartman, and mixes with Meshell Ndegeocello’s Thus Sayeth the Lorde, a tribute to Audre Lorde’s defiant voice. For Diop, the film’s 21 minutes carry the same weight as her feature Saint Omer, placing visibility and expression at the centre of cinema’s gaze.

Miu Miu marked the occasion with an intimate dinner at Ca’ Corner della Regina, attended by an intergenerational gathering of filmmakers, actors and cultural figures including Emma Corrin, Emily Blunt, Willem Dafoe, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Amanda Seyfried and Céline Sciamma.

Fifteen years on, Women’s Tales remains the longest-running platform of female-directed shorts, with each film pairing Miu Miu’s collections with narratives that expand what femininity can look like today. As Miuccia Prada has said, “With the Women’s Tales, we created a conversation with women about women.”

Fragments for Venus will be available globally on MUBI from September 15th, extending that conversation beyond Venice, into homes and screens worldwide.

images: courtesy of MIU MIU