Alice Diop’s Latest Short Film Explores Black Female Identity
Miu Miu Women’s Tales celebrates the filmmaker’s latest creation.
Launched in 2011, Miu Miu Women’s Tales is the longest-running platform supporting the creation of short films by women and about women – or, more specifically, femininity and its relationship with vanity. Its latest commission is helmed by the incisive French film-maker Alice Diop, whose short Fragments for Venus is a powerful reclamation of identity pertinent to the times.
French film‑maker Alice Diop is the latest female director invited to explore femininity in the 21st century under the Miu Miu Women’s Tales initiative, which grants acclaimed female film‑makers full creative freedom in their telling of how women are represented. Her short, Fragments for Venus, follows two Black women navigating how figures such as themselves are seen – or unseen – in culture and real life.
For its 30th chapter, Miu Miu Women’s Tales hands the camera to French film‑maker Alice Diop, whose work has long centred on those rarely seen in cinema or society. Her short film, Fragments for Venus, which premiered under the Venice Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori section this August 30, extends the series’s over‑decade‑long exploration of how women see and represent themselves with piercing perceptiveness.
With a stylish documentarian eye (nearly everyone’s kitted out in Miu Miu, after all), the 21‑minute‑long film trails two Black women. One wanders through a museum, investigating and questioning how Western art has framed the Black female body, while the other strolls through Brooklyn, encountering diverse women who embody that form in real life – all free, confident and utterly resplendent.
Consider Miu Miu Women’s Tales one of the most thought-provoking yet fun ways in which fashion and film intersect. Besides the debut of Diop’s short Fragments for Venus, the latest instalment, which was presented at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, included a screening of director Joanna Hogg’s Autobiografia di una Borsetta as well as panels with the two directors and a host of emerging actresses including (above, from left) Sarah Catherine Hook, Milly Alcock and Myha’la Herrold.
While it was inspired by American poet Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, which comprises titles and exhibit descriptions in Western art that depict the Black female form, the film ends with a triumphant, slam poetry‑style rendition of a song celebrating civil rights activist Audre Lorde.
“We – Black people – come from this history of painting in which we have been marginalised and objectified,” explains Diop. The film shows that “we artists, writers and thinkers are here now. It attests to the way in which we are now ready to express ourselves … This is an essential film to make at this time. It is my most simple and radical work to date, and it is there to make people talk.”
We couldn’t agree more and beckon you to decide for yourself: Fragments for Venus is now available for viewing on Miu Miu’s digital platforms as well as MUBI.
The girls who graced Miu Miu’s Women’s Tale event at the Venice Film Festival this year included (top row, from left to right) actress Alisha Boe, director Joanna Hogg and Milly Alcock; (middle row, from left to right) digital creator Tamu McPherson, filmmaker Alice Diop, and the one-and-only Maggie Gyllenhaal; and (bottom row, from left to right) actress Emma Corrin, the editor and panel moderator Penny Martin, and Sephora Pondi – one of the two leads in Diop’s film Fragments For Venus – all kitted out in Miu Miu, of course.
This article first appeared in Volume 4 of F ZINE.