Oasis in Venice: the Gallagher brothers’ reunion at the Film Festival
Watching Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger at 8:30 in the morning, the time of the Film Festival press screening, is an unexpected experience.
It is a film worth seeing. Not only to understand the past success of Oasis and the enormous success of the reunion of one of the world’s most celebrated rock bands. The important thing, for me, is that it is a film about forgiveness and the acceptance of two unrepeatable artists who resemble us. It begins as the story of Oasis’s return, but progressively tells of a mutual healing between artists and audience.
The Live ’25 tour brought Liam and Noel Gallagher back together after sixteen years and showed how their music continues to span generations. The film by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace follows the world tour, enters rehearsals and behind the scenes, and gathers the two brothers’ joint interviews after more than twenty years.
But above all, it watches the fans. People who have waited for this reunion for years and who, concert after concert, give back to the Gallaghers something that goes beyond music.
In the film, fathers and sons go to concerts together. There are young people who discovered Oasis many years after their first success, and people for whom those songs are the soundtrack of life. “Their songs don’t try to cheer you up when you’re down—says one fan—they get down on the ground with you and then help you get back up.”
The film returns to the origins in Manchester and to a working-class identity that worldwide fame has not erased. After the 2017 attack at the Manchester Arena, Don’t Look Back in Anger spontaneously became a collective anthem for the city to face its grief.
Liam and Noel also appear different in the film: they speak about their vulnerabilities, their age, the relationship between them as they begin to be together again. “I feel like I’m exorcising demons, getting all the anger out,” says Liam. Noel admits he was not prepared for the scale of the affection that welcomed them. Both are incredulous and happy about this second chance. “Everything has been forgiven, and it didn’t even take a word.”
My impression is that the love received during this tour has somehow healed them as well. It is a story of “reconciliation and redemption,” says Steven Knight, writer and producer of the film.
The reconciliation between Liam and Noel is the film’s evident thread, but what makes it possible is the audience: evening after evening, stadium after stadium, reminding the two brothers that those songs now also belong to other people’s lives.
In the film there is a young man overwhelmed by emotion after the first concert. Among many, it is one of the moments in which the collective dimension of this return is understood. That emotion also reaches us in the screening room in the morning, and in the evening it gives the brothers an eight-minute standing ovation in the Sala Grande.
The documentary Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger will be released in Italian cinemas on September 10, 2026, distributed by Warner Bros, and will arrive on Disney+ by the end of 2026. Directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, written by Steven Knight (creator of Peaky Blinders).
Article by Laura Scarpa. Images by Marta Formentello for Venezia da Vivere.
