Venice Film Festival 2026: Diane In The Loop (dirs. Ann Sirot & Raphaël Balboni) | Review

A noteworthy fact: Directors Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni are prominent figures in the Belgian film industry, consistently featuring in their films’ nominations at the Magritte Film Awards, with multiple recognitions. They may be regarded as connoisseurs of relational dynamics, rendered with sophistication, and their work often stands as its own testament. The path leads to the Venice International Film Festival this year with Diane In The Loop – and Diane (Ninon Borsei), our protagonist, finds herself circling through a labyrinth of uncertainties.

Diane is not like the women you pass on the street. She consistently wears a cowboy hat (just like most of the characters in the film) and carries a quiet war inside her – she loves men, and she despises them with equal intensity. Each encounter becomes a battlefield of philosophies, as layered and staggering as the film’s opening, where she muses on the nature of men. There is domination in her gaze, and a longing for acceptance. Nevertheless, she continues her search for the right partner and persists in her daily existence. Diane’s mother (Sandrine Blancke) has always maintained a fraught relationship with her daughter. During a confrontation, she reveals a long-concealed truth: she was raped three years prior to Diane’s birth. Diane is devastated, recognizing that this trauma has been transmitted to her, accounting for her deep-seated resentment toward men. She turns from her mother, seeking her own path, her own perfect match. And her mother, in the hollow left behind, reaches for her own lost dreams – an old lover waiting, a life left unfinished. Mother and daughter walk their own paths: one reaching backward, one reaching forward. But the present holds them both, pulling up questions that run deeper than time itself, meanings that refuse to settle. They are caught in a loop – not a circle that repeats, but a spiral that widens, that stumbles forward into the unknown.

The film reaches into the quiet spaces between strangers, those oblivious connections that catch us off guard, that arrive like questions: does everyone cross our path for a reason? A lesson? A realization? The directors take this notion and weave it into a witty, unexpected structure. We watch two characters stitch their pasts back together, mending what was broken in ways that feel both strange and inevitable. The directors are smart about it – using blame and revenge to pit characters against each other, every revenge feeding the other’s misery. There’s a deliberate focus on cultivating hate, even when the reasons feel thin. But that’s exactly what makes it interesting: it is not always grounded in justifiable reasoning, yet it forces a fresh perspective. 


The editing becomes a bridge between them – a quiet conversation across frames. As mother and daughter move through their journeys in their own strange ways, we see grief pass from one to the other like a whispered secret. The mother’s sorrow lands in the daughter’s gaze, and the daughter’s knowing returns to the mother’s eyes. They see each other through the cut. The film reveals a profound truth about mother-daughter relationships: women of all ages and circumstances, despite their differences, experience a journey that is uniquely their own – inaccessible to any external observer. This shared yet private experience is rendered with parallel precision through the directors’ masterful screenplay with Sophie Vercruysse and Raphaël Balboni’s seamless editing.

Diane In The Loop offers a peculiar yet compelling exploration of human connection, tracing pathways that resist linearity – some divergent, some curving, and even more valuable for their irregularity. It is an uncharted journey, a singular cinematic experience that dismantles and reassembles its audience into a coherent whole. The journey may not achieve perfection, but it orients itself toward a meaningful trajectory. Amid satirical and techno-musical elements, the film presents revenge and love – the latter functioning as a testament to unresolved emotional states. This dynamic reveals a mother and daughter who are more closely matched than either might have anticipated. The screenplay operates cyclically, oscillating between the mother and the daughter, each distinct yet equally substantial. Ironically, their differences prove more connective than their similarities – a critical observation embedded within the narrative. This might be Orizzonti’s most unexpected gift. Everything comes full circle, winding through memory, through trauma, through love – like a maze, like a loop that refuses to close. And maybe that’s life’s quiet magic: the beautiful certainty that nothing is certain.

The 83rd edition of the Venice International Film Festival is running on September 2-12, 2026.