New families, relationships with children, international conflicts are among the most recurring themes in the films coming to the festival in the Lagoon. With 21 titles in competition and more than 30 out, here’s what to keep an eye on in the festival that is about to begin
It may seem strange or inappropriate, but to understand what the Venice Film Festival has in store, it is often best to start from the Out of Competition. It is this container, which every year stretches and swells beyond the limits of physics like cartoons of the past, that hides the key to the selection. The films that could not be refused. Those that are best protected from missed recognition. The authors who, having already won a Golden Lion, it would be inelegant to put back into the competition, like the Filipino Lav Diaz, famous for his monstrous lengths, this year at the Lido with the 250 minutes of “Phantosmia” (but if this criterion holds, one wonders why “Joker: folie à deux”, the sequel to the 2019 Lion, is instead in competition). Etc.
From Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” at the opening, to Pupi Avati’s “The American Garden” at the closing (1940s, paranormal, black and white “à la Hitchcock”), more than 30 titles are in fact screening out of competition, including a short by Bellocchio (“If I May Be Able – Chapter II”) and one by Alice Rohrwacher and JR (“Allégorie cittadine”); a Lelouch entitled “Finalement” that echoes Jim Carrey’s “Liar Liar”; Takeshi Kitano’s latest folly, the 1997 Lion, “Broken Rage”; a docu-monster by D’Anolfi and Parenti, “Bestiari, erbari, lapidari”, 205 minutes; a docu-fiction by Israeli Amos Gitai, “Why War”; Francesca Comencini’s film about her relationship with her father, “Il tempo che ci vuole”, nominated for the award right now because it wasn’t in competition. Without forgetting the TV series by names like Cuarón (“Disclaimer”), Sorogoyen (“Los años nuevos”) or Joe Wright with “M – Son of the Century”, based on the international bestseller by Antonio Scurati, with Luca Marinelli reinventing Mussolini for globalized audiences and perhaps untouched by Luce newsreels.
Sex, magic and video calls
In short, Venice lacks nothing except Netflix, which having changed helmsman will miss a turn but will return. The rest is 360-degree cinema, Barbera swears. Great authors, great entertainment, new discoveries, bizarre objects, all zigzagging between Hollywood and the rest of the world. With a surprise guest – sex – central to various titles in Competition including “Queer” by Guadagnino with the marble-like Daniel Craig, ex-007, in the role of a gay drug addict (the game on the image of the star of the moment is one of the most valuable currencies on the market); “Love”, by the Norwegian Dag Johan Haugerud, where the game is led by a woman; or “Babygirl” by the Dutch Halina Reijn with Nicole Kidman, sex, power and blackmail in a large company. While in “Diva Futura” Giulia Steigerwalt reinterprets the history of Schicchi and Ilona Staller’s porn agency. More sophisticated is “Trois amies” by Emmanuel Mouret, heir to Rohmer and Marivaux with a touch of the best Woody Allen. Even if the curiosity is all for the “Mistress Dispeller” by the Chinese Elizabeth Lo (Orizzonti), a professional specialized in convincing the lovers of married men to give up the bone. And the crudest images, Barbera assures, come from “Disclaimer” by Cuarón. Which from the title seems to warn us: the point is not sex, increasingly easy, but responsibility, increasingly rare.
Children in Time
It is perhaps no coincidence that among the themes that recur insistently in each section are children, care, filiation, transmission. From Almodovar (“The Room Next Door”) to the Boukherma brothers (“Leurs enfants après eux”), from the Coulin sisters in “Jouer avec le feu” (even the recurrence of couples of consanguineous directors makes one think), all in Competition, to “Mon inséparable” by Anne-Sophie Bailly, Orizzonti. But there are kidnapped children in “Pooja, Sir” by the Nepalese Deepak Rauniyar; mistreated children in “Familia” by the talented and non-binary Francesco Costabile; independent fifty-year-olds who discover they are too attached to their neighbor’s children in “L’attachement” by Carine Tardieu; children torn from their illegal immigrant parents in “Separated” by the great American documentary maker Errol Morris. As if in an increasingly controlled and dematerialized world, the relationship with children were one of the last remaining spaces of freedom, to be defended and invented moment by moment. And here are adventurous adoptions in “Vakhim” by Francesca Pirani as well as in “Victoria” by Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman, another couple of directors. Without forgetting the little rebellious 13-year-old in “Manas”, by Brazilian Marianna Brennand, who from the heart of the Amazon tries desperately to find her own way; or the pregnant teenager in the Dominican “Sugar Island” by Johanné Gómez Terrero, both at the Giornate, which this year pulverizes every record of gender equality, with 17 female directors out of 28 titles selected.
“Sudan, remember” by the French-Tunisian registry Hind MeddebtraWhat to do when the world is on fire?
Furious but a bit scattered also the rumble that comes from the war zones. The most ambitious work seems to be “Of Dogs and Men” by the Israeli Dani Rosenberg, filmed close to October 7 with an actress mixed with the inhabitants of the kibbutz Nir Oz, devastated by the attacks of Hamas, produced among others by the Italian Donatella Palermo. Amos Gitai starts from the 1931 dialogue between Freud and Jung (“Why War”); Göran Hugo Olsson questions the alleged Scandinavian neutrality in “Israel Palestine on Swedish Tv 1968-1989”. While on the Ukrainian front, always Out of Competition, we find “Russians at War” by Anastasia Trofimova, a Moscow director but a French-Canadian production, a year at the front with a Russian medical unit to dismantle propaganda and even Western clichés. And the specular “Songs of Slow Burning Earth” by the Ukrainian documentary maker Olha Zhurba. It is curious that the Official Competition only features the First and Second World War by Amelio (“Campo di battaglia”) and Maura Delpero (“Vermiglio”), evidently war has never attracted major productions like it has today. But one can console oneself with “Soudan, souviens-toi” by the Franco-Tunisian Hind Meddeb (Giornate), a lyrical, heartbreaking testimony collected among the young and very young opponents who since 2019 have tried by every means, excluding violence, to overthrow the regime.
If the past does not pass
Nothing better than cinema, after all, allows us to read the present through the past. And here is “September 5” by Tim Fehlbaum, which returns to the 1972 Munich Olympics from the revealing point of view of a US television team that followed the story of the Israeli hostages live. Here is Walter Salles and the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1970s (“I am still here”). Or the US white supremacists who in the 1980s financed their terrorist acts with robberies (“The Order” by Justin Kurzel). And the English farmers of the sixteenth century who make the new arrivals pay for the economic crisis (“Harvest” by Athina Rachel Tsangari), all in Competition. Although none of these titles, we could be wrong, promises to be one of the revelations of the Festival. Which instead ensures surprises in all the sections.
One to keep an eye on
Will Pablo Larraín manage to win the award he has deserved for years with “Maria” (Callas), starring Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher? Will the Argentine “Kill the Jockey”, by Luis Ortega, really be the outsider that leaves its mark? And will the new “Joker” be a triumph or a disappointment? Among the Italians, in addition to Comencini, the buzz is for Maura Delpero (“Vermiglio”), for “Iddu” by Piazza and Grassadonia, remotely inspired by Messina Denaro’s time as a fugitive, for “La storia del Frank e della Nina” by Paola Randi (Orizzonti Extra), for the second direction by Valerio Mastandrea, who opens Orizzonti with “Nonostante”. But those in the know also speak marvelously of two Georgian films, “April” by Dea Kulumbegashvili, Competition, and “The Antique” by Rusudan Glurjidze, Giornate, and of the Iranian “Boomerang” by Shahab Fotouhi, a debut under the sign of Truffaut (also at the Giornate). Which in addition to the films also ensure a flurry of meetings and discussions, hopefully passionate, on hot topics such as the economic and legal rights of filmmakers under 35, artificial intelligence, dialogue in the Middle East (with Tahar Ben Jelloun and Luciana Castellina). And the many forms of censorship present in our cinema: genre, market, culture.