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| da Vinci, La Belle Ferronnière |
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| Zanelli Muholi photo |
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| Nona Faustine photo |
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| Director Alice Diop |
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| director on the set |
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| A Great Day in Harlem, 1958 |
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| Meshell Ndegeocello |
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| Audrey Lorde |
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| Miuccia Prada |
FRAGMENTS FOR VENUS B France (21 mi) 2025 d: Alice Diop
I conceive this short film Fragments for Venus as a self-portrait constructed as a collage of images, texts, scenes, and situations that draw as much from documentary as from fiction. It will be mixed with a very subjective set of references with which I have built myself. Paintings, sculptures, films, and book excerpts will be cited: those that may have broken me, sometimes hurt me, and all those that I have found to heal myself and overcome the pain inflicted by this form. In particular, the paintings, photographs, and sculptures I choose represent Black women freed from enslaving representation, in works by Black or white artists, mainly from the 20th and 21st centuries. —Director Alice Diop
A lot to unpack here, from the maker of 2023 Top Ten List #3 Saint Omer (2022) and We (Nous) (2021), known for her incisive portraits of marginalized communities, also chronicling motherhood, migration, and justice, bringing together a mix of theater, literature, and cinema, Diop took inspiration from an extraordinary experimental text, Voyage of the Sable Venus, the 2015 National Book Award-winning poetry collection by Los Angeles poet laureate Robin Coste Lewis, a PhD from the University of Southern California’s Creative Writing and Literature Program, with a fellowship in Poetry and Visual Studies, which is entirely made up of titles of exhibitions or descriptions of western art objects featuring black female figures, where the work reveals the racist, patriarchal structures that underpin so much of Western art. Working in a multidisciplinary way in approaching her art, Diop also premiered a theatrical adaptation of the epilogue from Voyage of the Sable Venus in a stage performance in Paris for the Festival d’Automne last November. According to the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, works by black female artists represent just 0.5 percent of the acquisitions by major American museums and the art market from 2008 to 2020, and 0.1 percent of all auction sales. The film opens to a voice reading excerpts of a poem against a black screen describing black art objects, some missing vital pieces of their anatomy from damage, yet all we hear is a bland description with no visual accompaniment. This is followed by an unnamed black woman (Kayije Kagame from 2023 Top Ten List #3 Saint Omer) in the Louvre art museum viewing paintings hanging on the wall, where the featured subjects are the forms and figures of whites, with blacks occasionally seen lingering in the background, servants, slaves, and domestiques, each having their own unique appearance, yet the woman remains a mystery, not really a character, per se, but something of an ephemeral presence inhabiting the spirits of the past, gradually revealing the representation of black women in the history of Western art, all too often marginalized, exoticized, and silenced. What this captures is the art of looking at paintings, moving freely about what could be any number of art museums around the world, as this specific place is never mentioned. What stands out is the empty space (a rare opportunity to film in an empty museum), as the cavernous museum is in itself an abstraction that accentuates quiet contemplation, where each individual viewer may bring their own personal experience into what they’re seeing. A meditation on the “Venus” trope and gaze, historical representations of beauty and femininity, at the center is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, La Belle Ferronnière, revealing the intensity of the gaze, wanting black women to be looked at, painted, or photographed with that same intensity, yet there are also paintings like Ingres’ Grande Odalisque or The Wedding at Cana (Veronese), all from different periods of the past, moving from one porcelain-skinned woman to the next, while also offering a hint of what it must have been like in those earlier times. Deliberately contrasting historical portrayals with the more liberating modern styles and decors of contemporary times, which is even more prevalent as the camera ventures outside, capturing spontaneous moments on the streets of New York, Diop creates a visual dialogue between the past and the present.
Since its launch in 2011, Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales has become the longest-running female-led short film platform, commissioning 30 unique stories from visionary directors including Agnès Varda, Lucrecia Martel, Lynne Ramsay, Chloé Zhao, and Joanna Hogg. Each film merges the language of cinema with the spirit of Miu Miu, where clothes act not merely as costumes, but as characters within the narrative. The house of Miu Miu is a globally influential fashion brand that is elegant, modern, and imaginative, with a slightly vintage touch, where the only stipulation is that the films use Miu Miu clothing, as other than that, the exclusively female directors are given free rein to create their films, defined by their own imaginations, offering a space for experimentation, which is rare in the film industry. For Miuccia Prada, the series has always been about more than fashion, as it is about conversation, women talking about women, reframing femininity in all its contradictions and possibilities, with this film continuing this lineage, proving once again that Miu Miu is not just designing for women, but adapting to changing styles and identities. Listed by Nicole Brenz, prominent film critic, film studies professor, and curator for the experimental cinema programs at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, in her Best Movies of 2025, once again working with cinematographer Claire Mathon, this freeform cinematographic essay enhances our way of seeing the world around us, as it questions the art of looking, even at the fleeting glimpses of faces. Diop’s filmmaking consistently seeks to create complex portraits of black women, a representation largely absent in film and literature. Initiated while a visiting professor at Harvard, offering her a chance to shoot in the United States, literally staying in the home of American sculptor Simone Leigh, coming four years since her last shoot, the film attempts to heal distorted representations, specifically the invisibility of black women in cinema, art history, and in painting, instead forced to accept a certain type of beauty, while excluding others, which influences the way we perceive ourselves, shaped by historical knowledge of the museum’s role in generating biased and objectified perceptions of black femininity premised on erasure, dehumanization, and subjugation. At worst that is represented by the freak show display of Sarah Baartman, the Hottentat Venus in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010), a film that reveals how science was used in a particularly debasing manner to justify white European racial superiority, with Diop further extending an idea envisioned by Mati Diop (no relation) in her film Dahomey (2024), which spoke from the perspective of stolen African art objects themselves, which were unceremoniously plundered by invading colonial powers and then placed in European museums for more “civilized” viewing pleasure. Feeling a responsibility as a filmmaker to create new figures, new images, and reformulate new ideas, Diop follows two black women, one in France and one in America, in their search for how women represent themselves, driven by the text of the Robin Coste Lewis poem, a sprawling epic journey tracing through thousands of years of art history, so there’s a link between these fleeting bodies and faces, essentially portraits of women collected on the streets, and how we view paintings in a museum, as in each case there’s an attempt to capture their inner soul, the fire that burns within.
Outside, a recurring image is another black woman sitting on a park bench, Séphora Pondi of the Comédie-Française, an alter-ego who describes herself as a poet, seen sunning herself on a beautiful summer day, seemingly representative of the neighborhood and our guide to this mix of fiction and documentary, as she witnesses what is seen on the streets of Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York. She appears to be a woman on an aesthetic quest in search of faces, specifically the faces of black women, as her gaze moves from a dancing crossing guard to a commuter in the subway, from a musician playing a flute to a lady painting on a bench, where each individual image is a work of art by itself, very fragmentary and kaleidoscopic, but Diop has collectively brought them together with a minimum of movement, asking what femininity and appearance mean in the 21st century, with these women finally owning and celebrating their own black identity, allowing viewers to capture their essence, not of what they appear to be, but who they actually are. Beauty does not exist in a vacuum, as there have been centuries of violence, erasure, and confinement of the black female form, tracing back to the Transatlantic slave trade which reduced people to subhumans, where the raping of enslaved black women was all too commonplace, with Diop, through the Lewis text, serving as an allegory for the slave trade, re-imagining Botticelli’s Venus (The Birth of Venus), literally reclaiming the representation of the black body from the gaze of Western art history. Beauty is a central narrative and thematic concern in Lewis’s debut poetry collection, which attends acutely to the effaced, elusive, and erased figures of black women throughout the Western world, where her centerpiece poem mirrors the descriptions of Western art objects, like “Statuette of a black slave girl,” or “Fragment from a statuette of a black dancing girl,” which is exactly how they were described in museum catalogues and exhibitions, removing all warmth or human depth of feeling, revealing the power in naming. Appropriately, Pondi looks at the black women all around her, finally able to express themselves freely as living, vibrant presences, and contemporary incarnations of a new Venus. Today’s most famous Venus is arguably Venus Williams (Venus of Compton), the American tennis player who rose from a poverty-stricken, gang-ridden Compton, California to become a world-class champion athlete, creating her own public persona and aesthetic, including her signature twirl after every win. Near the end of the film, a hundred assembled black women have gathered collectively on a Brooklyn sidewalk, recreating a famous 1958 photograph, A Great Day in Harlem, a black-and-white photograph of 57 jazz musicians in Harlem. Featuring a sculpture by Simone Leigh, a photo by Zanelli Muholi (Zanele Muholi's 'Somnyama Ngonyama' in London), or a painting by Jennifer Packer (The power of colour-The brilliant painting of Jennifer Packer), the film is dedicated to Nona Faustine (1977–2025), an American photographer and visual artist, whose work is as much concerned with black female perspectives as this short itself, featuring her fiercely defiant work, They Tagged the Land with Trophies and Institutions from their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC 2013, Nona Faustine. They Tagged the Land with Trophies and ..., which resembles a modern day image of The Myth of Sisyphus. Over the final credits we hear an evocative poem, Thus Sayeth The Lorde YouTube (5:40), written by American singer-songwriter, poet, and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, spoken by Staceyann Chin, referencing the writings of poet and activist Audre Lorde, who has been described as “black, lesbian, socialist, mother, warrior, poet,” exploring themes of black queer liberation and identity, using a “church service” framework to elevate Lorde’s words, adding additional significance to what we’ve seen. During a time when there is a rise of authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry around the world, adding another dimension of historical depth fills a needed void, as art has the capacity to make these women eternal.
Audre Lorde said, “we were never meant to survive”
Lorde said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself”
“I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive”
The Lorde tells us that there is no thing as a single issue struggle
Because we do not live single issue lives
The Lorde said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree”
The Lorde said, “When the sun rises, we are afraid”
“When the sun sets, we are afraid”
“When our stomachs are full, we are afraid”
“When our stomachs are empty, we are afraid”
“When we are loved, we are afraid”
“When we are alone, we are afraid”
“When we are silent, we are still afraid” (wait for it)
(Thus sayeth the Lorde)
So the Lorde said, “It is better to speak”
“Remembering, we were never meant to survive”
And because she knew that speaking was going to be uncomfortable
Because she knew that speaking was going to be hard
The Lorde tells us our speaking out will irritate some people
Get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt dinner parties
But then the Lorde said our speaking will permit other women to speak
Until laws are changed, until lives are saved
And the world is altered forever
But the Lorde also said (thus sayeth the Lorde)
“The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”
“They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game”
“But they will never enable us to bring about genuine change”
The Lorde said, “Revolution is not a one-time event”
The good Lorde tells us
“There’s only one thing more frightening than speaking your own truth”
“And that is not speaking” (thus sayeth the Lorde)
Audre Lorde said, “it is better to speak remembering”
“We were never meant to survive”
The Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you”
“So it is better to speak remembering, we were never meant to survive”
We were never meant to survive
We were never meant to survive (we were never meant to survive)
Thus sayeth the Lorde
Fragments for Venus by Alice Diop – Miu Miu Women's Tales ... The film in its entirety may be seen on YouTube (20:55)
