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.”
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