Alice Diop’s short film ‘Fragments for Venus’ enters the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series as a poetic gesture of resistance and recognition.
With ‘Fragments for Venus’, the 30th chapter of Miu Miu Women’s Tales, French filmmaker Alice Diop brings a meditative and radical perspective to the dialogue between cinema, femininity and fashion. Premiered at Giornate degli Autori during the Venice Film Festival, the 21-minute film unfolds across two worlds: a museum where a Black woman confronts Western art’s exclusions, and the streets of Brooklyn, where another woman encounters living embodiments of Venus in the faces and bodies of Black women today.
Rooted in the poem ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus’ by Robin Coste Lewis, the short reframes art history by reclaiming visibility and space for a body too often objectified or erased. Diop’s language is deliberately quiet, letting pauses and lingering looks turn into a politics of attention. She has described the film as a “filmic gesture” as important to her as her feature ‘Saint Omer’, a declaration that positions this work not as a side note but as a cornerstone in her practice.
Fashion threads through the piece with disarming subtlety. Wardrobe choices echo the film’s themes of exposure and protection, aligning the contemporary resonance of Miu Miu with the weight of cultural memory. The closing sequence, set to ‘Thus Sayeth the Lorde’ by Meshell Ndegeocello, summons the voice and legacy of Audre Lorde, reminding us that poetry—and how we listen to it—can be a weapon for justice.
‘Fragments for Venus’ turns looking into an act of tenderness and resistance. By holding the gaze on Black women’s beauty, presence and subjectivity, Diop reimagines what it means to be Venus now: not an ideal imprisoned on canvas, but a living, thinking body that insists on being seen.
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