It wouldn’t be a festival without at least one scandal or controversy, something to discuss beyond the dozens of films, the stars, the red carpets, and the ritual dip in the waters of the Lido.

This year, at the 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival, the controversy came on the first day with the suspension of screenings for the film The Antique by Georgian director Rusudan Glurjidze, which was competing in the Giornate degli Autori section. It disappeared from the program on Aug. 28 and 29.

There is still a chance to see it on Sept. 6, but tickets for that date have not yet gone on sale and nobody knows if the dispute will be resolved. The film was halted by an emergency decree from the Venice Court, which accepted the appeal by minority producers Viva Film (Russia), Avantura Film (Croatia), and Pygmalion (Cyprus) for alleged copyright infringement.

“A true attempt at censorship,” protested the director, who explained to Variety: “At first, we had problems with the Russian Ministry of Culture, which asked us to remove a series of scenes. The Georgian team refused, and they tried to stop the shooting, finally confiscating the material at the border. Fortunately, two copies were saved. At that point, they tried to block it.”

“The measure mentioned does not prohibit the screening,” stated Giorgio Gosetti, one of the curators of the Giornate degli Autori, during a packed press conference in the cinema of the Giornate degli Autori section. “We believe that, in the spirit of Giornate degli Autori, our primary duty, shared with the associations of Italian filmmakers promoting our festival, is to defend copyright and thus the director Rusudan Glurjidze, who is present in Venice.”

He added, “We also believe that the judge’s ruling from the Venice Court should be seriously considered at this point while awaiting further developments. That said, we will do everything possible, respecting the law but also the author’s freedom of expression, to support the very existence of the work and its visibility in Venice in the coming days.”

Written by the director and an anonymous writer and partly shot in Saint Petersburg, The Antique, originally titled Antikvariati, tells the story of a young Georgian named Lado, who gets involved in smuggling antique furniture from his home country to Russia while thousands of Georgians are being illegally deported from Russia. The caption that introduces the film states, “Inspired by the brutal and illegal deportation of thousands of Georgians carried out by the Russian government in 2006.”

Director Glurjidze has always tried to tell the story of her country. Her debut, House of Others, presented at the Karlovy Vary Festival in 2016, won the Grand Prix and was Georgia’s entry for the Oscars that year. It recounted the aftermath of the 1992-93 war in Abkhazia, following the lives of two families devastated by the conflict.

“In my previous works,” she said at the press conference, “I ventured into the complex political landscape, trying to recount events that do not appear in Western narratives. The Antique bravely depicts the brutal and illegal deportation of my compatriots through the stories of four characters. As in House of Others, the film intertwines reality with imagination, delicately yet powerfully focusing on the difficult and painful realities of immigration and providing a stark portrayal of Russian imperial cruelty.”