Slavoj Žižek Takes On Utopia in New Venice Documentary

Controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek is back on screen with The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, a fresh documentary from director Sophie Fiennes that premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The film dissects how movies, TV, art and pop culture portray utopian ideals the latest installment in an increasingly ambitious creative partnership between the Slovenian thinker and the British filmmaker.

The documentary landed at Venice to considerable buzz, thanks to its blend of philosophical inquiry, film criticism and Žižek’s irreverent wit.

This marks the third collaboration between Žižek and Fiennes, following The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Where those films unpacked hidden meanings and political messaging in mainstream movies, the new project widens its lens to examine utopian thought itself.

Rather than celebrate utopia as simple wish-fulfillment, the film interrogates how we imagine paradise, liberation and social transformation and whether those visions ultimately reinforce the very systems they aim to overthrow. Drawing on psychoanalysis, Marxist theory and Hegelian philosophy, Žižek investigates the contradictions lurking beneath seemingly flawless societies, suggesting that even radical ideas can be co-opted by existing power structures.

Žižek traces utopian thinking across cinema and television, examining how filmmakers encode society’s aspirations, anxieties and political convictions. The documentary draws on an eclectic range of examples The Rapture, Last Year at Marienbad, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to argue that seemingly disparate stories reveal shared preoccupations with desire and social control.

True to form, Žižek appears throughout in recreated film scenes, delivering commentary that’s both intellectually rigorous and playfully irreverent.

The film’s focus on utopian possibility feels particularly timely. As dystopian narratives saturate contemporary cinema and television, Žižek asks why visions of an ideal world strike audiences as less compelling or more elusive than tales of societal collapse.

With ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias’, Fiennes and Žižek continue their ongoing investigation into how cinema shapes ideology. The result is a documentary that uses popular entertainment as a springboard for urgent questions about power, imagination and whether a better world remains conceivable.