Wasikowska Leads Dorabialski's Venice Debut 'Agata the Writer' — SkimNews
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- "Agata the Writer" premiered in the Giornate degli Autori (Venice Days) sidebar at the Venice Film Festival, marking the debut feature of writer-director Kuba Dorabialski
- Mia Wasikowska stars as Agata, a Polish-Australian satirical novelist who travels to Sarajevo to research a novel about a father-daughter relationship during the Bosnian War
- Dorabialski takes solo credit for writing, shooting, editing, and scoring the film, a "one-man-band" debut the reviewer calls "confidently willful"
- The film executes a structural pivot that halts narrative action for extended voiceover of Agata's incomplete draft — presented as a screenplay rather than a novel — before folding back on itself
- Vedrana Božinović plays Jasmina, a brusque Sarajevo theater director whose retort to Agata's naïve wartime question — "Enjoy? It was genocide" — anchors the film's outsider-versus-insider tension
- The reviewer's Variety piece calls the film "among the most bracingly singular works at this year's Venice Film Festival" while warning it "will likely divide viewers with its intractable narrative swerves and culs-de-sac"
Why it matters: The Venice sidebar debut marks Wasikowska's first substantial dramatic feature role since Mia Hansen-Løve's 2021 "Bergman Island," reviving her on-screen persona as a visibly thinking, deliberate performer. For festival programmers and indie distributors, the film's central gamble — halting all action for pages of voiceover about an unwritten novel — will either define its singularity or make it unsellable beyond cinephile circuits.
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