The Colombian film "The End of Times" (El fin de los tiempos), from co-directors Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas Maldonado, will have its world premiere in the competition lineup of Venice Critics' Week on 10 September. The film blends found footage with AI-generated material to explore trauma and depression, with its makers stating an explicit aim to "politicize mental illness" by framing sadness as a social and political response to conditions under contemporary capitalism, rather than purely a psychiatric issue.

The story follows a woman named Salomé, who searches through five decades of family footage to understand the roots of her mother's sadness, using AI to imagine alternative versions of her mother's life. Cárdenas Maldonado wrote the screenplay while Rojas Gómez edited, and both share cinematography credit; Split Screen is handling international sales. In a directors' statement, the pair criticised the "glorified technological utopia" narrative around AI, arguing it exposes exploitation of labour in "peripheral countries," and The Hollywood Reporter is exclusively premiering the film's trailer ahead of the festival screening.