The 2025 Venice Film Festival has proven itself to be just as buzzy, fashion-y, gossipy, and standing ovation-y as any installments in the floating city before it. There were the much-hyped movies and imminent awards-season contenders, from Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. But there was also a pre-fashion month state of play for designers preempting their official debut collections, with Louise Trotter’s Bottega Veneta appearing on stars like Jacob Elordi and Vicky Krieps, and onlookers getting a first glimpse at Dario Vitale’s Versace vision on outfit-sharing Julia Roberts and Amanda Seyfried. And then there was Sofia Coppola’s much-anticipated documentary film on Marc Jacobs, the perfect marriage of fashion and film.
This year’s guest list also ran the gamut of industry figures: while the likes of Ayo Edebiri and Callum Turner made their Venice debuts, there were plenty of festival veterans swanning the Lido too, from a red-lipped and YSL-swathed Chloë Sevigny to Charlotte Rampling and Willem Dafoe. Photographer Francesc Planes was on the ground—and traversing the canals—for Vogue to capture it all.
“The festival is not super big like Cannes, but that’s what makes it more interesting and special,” says Planes, who regularly walks the Croisette and the canals to shoot the stars during festival season. “The location is also super cute. You go to places in small private boats and you feel like a star. You go to private parties on those boats, in special locations far from the crowds, where you can’t get by walking—it feels like a movie.
“What fascinates me about film festivals like Venice or Cannes is the amount of people who have nothing to do with cinema,” Planes adds. “People who go there just to show off, or to be rich, or to socialize, or to post on social media.”
First, Planes caught Elordi as he arrived at the historic Gritti Palace for the Frankenstein premiere. The energetic and effusive actor noticed Planes’s Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, which he’s been experimenting with. “He says, ‘Those glasses are the devil,’” Planes reports—though Elordi was happy to pose for a few portraits before the screening.
More stars captured across the 2025 Venice Film Festival: Rampling, there for Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother—“She was surprised that I wanted to take her portrait”—and The Souffleur’s Dafoe. “I’m used to seeing him around at Cannes and Venice,” says Planes. “I don’t get surprised anymore. He’s common for me now! I bump into him randomly at the stairs of the Hotel Excelsior, we chat a bit, and he poses.” Next comes Frankenstein’s Christoph Waltz, After the Hunt’s Sevigny, and Michèle Lamy, who was mostly in Venice for vacation and vibes. “I ran into her on the festival promenade in her flip-flops. We greeted each other and I was glad to see her outside Paris Fashion Week,” Planes says. “In the following days, I would see her at several movies.”
Celebrities aside, Planes finds the city’s fabulous, well-dressed older women—recalling sciura, a name for Milan’s elegant old ladies—inspiring to capture. “They dress in extravagant dresses and hats, and do the most spectacular makeup. They go to the festival to show themselves off and have fun. I don’t know if they’re interested in cinema, but they’re there every festival giving it all and serving looks,” says Planes. “There are some I see from festival to festival, from country to country.” One woman in particular wears a gargantuan sculptural fascinator with fresh flowers. “If she’s there to get into the cinema,” Planes says, “I don’t want to imagine the person sitting behind her.”
Outside the festival’s main hubs, crowds of fans gathered, wielding phones and screaming at the sights. “Suddenly you see the nature of the human being,” says Planes. “You see people running, faces of joy, of passion. Always, those faces come accompanied by a camera in hand that wants to immortalize their face next to the celebrity’s face. That struggle to get the photo and the contrast with the celebrity’s anxiety makes the scene a spectacle worthy of a movie itself.”
Planes captured dense rows of fans at the premiere fences, vying for the now very vintage practice of getting autographs. “I’m obsessed with a guy I first saw three years ago in Cannes, who’s always running around the festival asking for photos and autographs,” says Planes. “He only dedicates himself to that. There’s also another guy who goes to all the festivals, who always puts a stuffed animal on his head. Each festival he wears a different one, and he’s always behind the fence. I don’t think he even goes to see movies.”
Inside the screening rooms, Planes witnessed some of the famously prolonged standing ovations, and all the faces taking in awards-worthy debuts—along with some more divisive movies. Of one film Planes won’t name: “One lady started booing and shouting that the movie was very bad. It’s the first time I’ve seen that. I won’t say which movie it was…but yes, it was a bit bad! But booing the director and the cast at a premiere is crazy.”
Other small details from Venice captured on film: extra-large earrings, opera gloves clutching iPhones, and plump lacquered lips; the many-fingerprinted revolving door of the glamorous, historic Hotel Excelsior; the pigeon-filled Piazza San Marco—Planes’s plan to possibly photograph Marc Jacobs among the birds was quickly scuppered—and beach-goers and passersby confused by the commotion. “One morning, with nothing to do, I threw myself onto the sand for a walk and to take photos with my black suit jacket, which I would later wear to the red carpet,” says Planes. “When people saw me walking on the sand in that temperature with that jacket, they laughed. It was fun to go from photographing celebrities to people melting on the beach, unaware of who was a few meters away.”
Below, the 2025 Venice Film Festival captured on film.
