Two Unusual Films Coming to Venice Explore Trauma, Memory and the Dark Side of Technology

The 2026 Venice film season is bringing two very different films that use unconventional filmmaking to explore deeply personal questions about trauma, memory, family and society.

One is Lene Berg’s The Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a hybrid film inspired by the arrest and later death of her filmmaker father. The other, The End of Times, is a Colombian film that combines family footage with artificial intelligence to examine depression, trauma and the political dimensions of mental illness.

Although the films come from very different creative backgrounds, both use filmmaking to question how people construct stories about themselves, their families and the world around them.

‘The Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ revisits a filmmaker’s family trauma

Norwegian filmmaker Lene Berg’s The Horsemen of the Apocalypse begins with a disturbing event from her childhood.

In 1975, Berg’s father, Norwegian filmmaker and author Arnljot Berg, was arrested in Paris and charged with the murder of his wife, Evelyne. Lene Berg was nine years old at the time.

Her father died by suicide in 1982.

Decades later, that experience became the starting point for Berg’s new film.

Rather than making a conventional documentary about her father, Berg has created a hybrid work that moves between documentary, staged scenes and fiction. The filmmaker herself appears in the movie, while actor Ane Dahl Torp plays her alter ego and Olav Waastad portrays her late father.

The film explores childhood trauma, family, guilt, memory and the narratives people create when trying to understand complicated events.

The film is part of a larger artistic project

Berg’s interest in her father’s story did not begin with the film.

She previously explored the material through an exhibition and a novel, From Father (Fra far). She has described the movie as part of a broader trilogy of works rather than a straightforward adaptation of those earlier projects.

That distinction is important to the film’s approach. Berg is not simply recreating the events of her childhood. She is questioning how a complicated family history can be told at all.

The director has said that the problem of constructing narratives around complicated experiences has been a recurring theme in her work.

That makes The Horsemen of the Apocalypse as much about storytelling and memory as it is about the events surrounding her father.

Why Berg does not want to call it a true-crime film

Despite beginning with an arrest and a murder charge, Berg does not want audiences to approach The Horsemen of the Apocalypse as a conventional true-crime documentary.

She said the “true crime” description was removed because it could create expectations that the film is primarily concerned with solving or reconstructing a crime.

Instead, Berg prefers to describe it as a tragic-comic story or a personal drama.

That mixture of tragedy and humor is deliberate. Her father is presented as a complicated figure who could be charismatic, funny and interesting while also being a deeply troubling person.

The film therefore avoids presenting its family history as a simple story with an obvious hero or villain.

A film that deliberately leaves questions unanswered

Berg also does not intend to provide a neat conclusion.

Her goal is for audiences to leave the theater still thinking about the story and its unanswered questions.

The filmmaking process itself becomes part of that idea. In the reenactment scenes, Berg plays a director who is sometimes reluctant to make the movie she is directing.

Her alter ego, played by Ane Dahl Torp, increasingly becomes the protagonist, while Berg also appears in the film.

The approach reflects the uncertainty involved in revisiting painful memories: the filmmaker is simultaneously trying to tell the story and questioning whether she should tell it at all.

The film still needs final financing

The production has already completed shooting and is now in the editing stage.

However, Berg is using the Venice Gap-Financing Market to seek the remaining money needed to finish the project.

The production is looking for approximately €130,000 ($151,000) in final financing.

The movie is produced by Norway’s Twentyone Pictures, with co-production involvement from Sweden and Germany and support from several European cultural and film institutions.

‘The End of Times’ brings AI into a story about trauma

While The Horsemen of the Apocalypse looks backward through family history, The End of Times takes a different approach by combining personal memories with artificial intelligence.

The Colombian film, directed by Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas Maldonado, uses found footage and AI to explore trauma and depression.

Its story follows Salomé as she searches through five decades of family footage in an attempt to understand the reasons behind her mother’s sadness.

The filmmakers describe the project as an attempt to “politicize mental illness,” connecting an intensely personal family story with broader questions about society and technology.

How AI fits into the film

AI is not simply being used as a technical filmmaking tool in The End of Times.

The filmmakers use it as part of the film’s exploration of whether another version of the world can be imagined.

The story places Salomé’s search for an explanation for her mother’s depression alongside questions about the future and the possibilities promised by new technology.

The directors argue that artificial intelligence represents the latest version of a long-running technological promise of progress.

But they also question who benefits from that progress.

Their statement points to issues including ambition, exploitation and misery, particularly from the perspective of countries and communities that experience the less visible costs of technological development.

‘The End of Times’ connects family history with a wider social question

The film’s central premise is deliberately intimate: a daughter looking through decades of family material to understand her mother.

But that personal investigation becomes something larger.

The filmmakers connect depression and family trauma with questions about capitalism, technological progress and the possibility of imagining a different future.

That gives the film two distinct layers. At one level, it is a search for the origins of a mother’s sadness. At another, it asks whether technology can really help people imagine a better world—or whether it simply reproduces existing inequalities in a new form.

When will ‘The End of Times’ premiere?

The End of Times is scheduled to have its world premiere on September 10, 2026, in the competition lineup of Venice Critics’ Week, an independent section of the Venice Film Festival.

The film is being handled internationally by Split Screen.

Two films, one broader question

Despite their different stories and filmmaking techniques, The Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The End of Times share an important idea: the stories people tell about trauma are rarely simple.

Berg uses her father’s arrest, death and her childhood memories to question how family history can be reconstructed decades later.

Rojas Gómez and Cárdenas Maldonado use family footage and AI to examine depression while connecting an individual experience to wider political and technological questions.

Neither film appears interested in providing an easy answer.

Instead, both filmmakers use unconventional forms to leave audiences with questions about memory, identity, trauma and the stories people create to make sense of difficult experiences.

For The Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that process is rooted in one filmmaker’s attempt to revisit her father as an adult and understand a childhood experience that remained complicated for decades.

For The End of Times, it becomes a search for another possible version of the world through the intersection of family memories and artificial intelligence.

Both films therefore arrive in Venice with something more ambitious than a straightforward personal story: they use filmmaking itself to ask how difficult realities can—and perhaps should—be remembered and represented.