"We Open in Venice" - the Film Festival

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"We Open in Venice" - the Film Festival

Details: Parent Category: Film Festivals; Category: Previews; Published on Tuesday, 30 August 2011 00:03; Written by L E Shannon

The 68th Venice International Film Festival is being held August 31 - September 10, 2011 at Palazzo del Cinema, Sala Darsena, PalaBiennale and Sala Perla at the Palazzo del Casinò, on the historic Lido in Venice, Italy.

This is the oldest film festival in the world, a natural evolution from an art exhibition in Venice that originated in the late 1800s, and later expanded to encompass film, theater and music.

Presented by La Biennale di Venezia, "The aim of the Festival is to raise awareness and promote all the various aspects of international cinema in all its forms: as art, entertainment and as an industry, in a spirit of freedom and tolerance. The Festival includes retrospectives and homages to major figures as a contribution towards raising awareness of the history of cinema."

Says Marco Müller, Festival Director, "Our objectives have remained the same: to engage and provoke the public’s intelligence and sensibility with the evidence of images that can fascinate you, make you dream, but also make you think; to search for the richest idiosyncrasies, gathering them not through assimilation but by means of comprehension, through an open encounter, an active process of seeing."

This year the Golden Lion f venice-ides-march or Lifetime Achievement Award is being presented to the award-winning writer/director Marco Bellocchio (Good Morning, Night, My Mother‛s Smile).

A new version of Bellocchio’s Nel nome del padre / In the Name of the Father (1971) will be screened at the Festival. This version is not a restoration, but an entirely new work culled from material for the original film by the director. Unlike most "director‛s cut" versions, this film is actually shorter, rather than longer: 90 minutes, down from the original 105 minutes.

The Opening Film Is The Ides of March, directed by George Clooney from 1998. In the last days before a heavily contested Ohio presidential primary, a campaign press secretary finds himself involved in a political scandal that threatens to upend his candidate’s shot at the presidency. Starring Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood

The World Premiere films include:

Sal
dir. James Franco
starring Val Lauren, James Franco, Jim Parrack
Franco’s film chronicles the final hours of the life of actor Sal Mineo. Although inspired by actual events, the film is not a traditional biopic. Instead, it takes the viewer on an intimate journey through the very last day of Mineo’s life, February 12, 1976. venice-white-snake

The Sorcerer and the White Snake / Baish Echuan shuo
dir. Tony Ching Siu-tung
starring Jet Li, Charlene Choi, Eva Huang, Raymond Lam, Jiang Wu, Lam Suet
A retelling of the Chinese classic fantasy The White Snake, in which a young herbalist falls into a lake and is rescued by the White Snake in the form of a beautiful lady.

4:44 Last Day on Earth
dir. Abel Ferrara
starring Willem Dafoe, Shanyn Leigh, Paz de la Huerta, Natasha Lyonne
Tomorrow, at 4:44 am, the world will come to an end -- and far more rapidly than even the worst doomsayer could have imagined. There will be no means of escape, no survivors. But there are those who still hope for some stay of execution, as it were.

A Dangerous Method
dir. David Cronenberg (Germany, Canada)
starring Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Vincent Cassel
The latest film from auteur Cronenberg is a look into "the turbulent relationships among fledgling psychiatrist Carl Jung, his mentor Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, the troubled but beautiful young woman who comes between them."

Duo Mingjin / Dyut Ming Gam / Life Without Principle
dir. Johnnie To (Hong Kong, China)
starring Ching Wan Lau, Ken Lo, Richie Ren
Three ordinary people in dire need of money have nothing in common until a bag of stolen money worth $5 million turns up. They are now forced to make soul-searching decisions about right and wrong and everything venice-carnage-polanski in between.

Wuthering Heightsdir. Andrea Arnold (UK)
starring Kaya Scodelario, Nichola Burley, Steve Evets, Oliver Milburn
The newest rendering of Emily Brontë’s only novel about love and rivalry in Yorkshire.

The Moth Diaries
dir. Mary Harron (Canada, Ireland)
starring Sarah Bolger, Sarah Gadon, Lily Cole, Scott Speedman
Rebecca, a young girl haunted by a death in the family, begins a new school year with her friend Lucy. But her friend becomes attached to a new student, who appears to have a deleterious effect on Lucy, and it is up to Rebecca to save her.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
dir. Tomas Alfredson (UK, Germany)
starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt
In the Cold War 1970s, George Smiley has retired from MI6 and is trying to adjust to "normal" life. But when a disgraced agent contacts him about a mole, Smiley is drawn back into the spy game to flush out the man who is "eating away at the heart of the British establishment."

Taojie / A Simple Life venice-simple-life
dir. Ann Hui (Hong Kong, China)
starring Andy Lau, Deanie Yip, Anthony Wong, Tsui Hark
A woman has served a family for 60 years as an amah until a stroke ends her work life and she learns how much she has meant to the family.

Carnage
dir. Roman Polanski (France, Germany, Spain, Poland)
starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly
A fight between two 11-year-olds leaves one so injured that a showdown ensues between the parents of both kids.

A special feature of this year‛s Festival is a retrospective on Italian experimental cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The films include:

Lido '28 (1928)
Anonymous
Three minutes of the luxurious and fascinating life of Venice’s Lido in the late 1920s. "Lido ... looks like the perfect location for a film based on a story by [F. Scott] Fitzgerald. Cinema, the real one, will soon arrive."

Inquietudine (1960)
dir. Mario Carbone
The film follows artist Franco Angeli, an exponent of the Piazza del Popolo school of painting, as he walks the streets of Rome and works in his studio.

Bis (1966) venice-black-block
dir. Paolo Brunatto starring Carmelo Bene, Lydia Mancinelli, Maria Monti, Ornella Ferrari, Sylvano Bussotti, Vittorio Gelmetti
The filmmaker recorded Carmelo Bene’s rehearsals of the first act of Il rosa e il nero, taken from Lewis, in Maria Monti’s apartment in Trastevere.

Il Canto d'Amore di Alfred Prufrock (1967)
dir. Nico D'Alessandria
T.S. Eliot’s text is read and interpreted with sights and sounds.

Several new documentaries are being screened, including:

Black Block
dir. Carlo Augusto Bachschmidt
The film explores the event in Genoa in 2001 when police attacked the Diaz School and inflicted tortures at the Bolzaneto Barracks. Veterans of the event recount their experiences, including one Berliner who declared the events of those days inspired him to become politically active.

Tahrir 2011
dir. Tamer Ezzat, Ayten Amin, Amr Salama (Egypt)
"On January 25, 2011, Egyptians woke up not expecting that a public holiday would turn into a revolution aimed to overthrow Egypt’s political regime." Thus begins the story of a revolution, told from the eyes of the filmmakers who each offer three aspects of the historical event: "The Good, The Bad, and The Politician".

Io Sono. Storie di Schiavitù
dir. Barbara Cupisti
"The stories of the protagonists are tales of slavery:" having paid enormous sums to criminal organizations for passage to Italy and a new life, they find only hardship, exploitation and even harder choices.

Other special events include:

Digital ExpoConferences:
- Cinema: The Near Future
- Cinema and Territory, held as part of ANICA incontra
- Cinema: the Challenge of Foreign Markets
Panel, Film is the Theatre: "The Centrality of the Film Theatre in the Entertainment Industry"
The Evolution of Digital Cinema and the Necessity for Collaboration between Technology, People, and Organization – by the European Digital Cinema Forum
The Eyes Don’t Lie: The Truth in 1/125 of a Second as Seen by Italian Cinema, a project by Riccardo Ghilardi on exhibit at Ca' Zanardi in Venice on display for two weeks.
Gucci Award for Women in Cinema– to be awarded to one of this year‛s nominees:
- Caroline Champetier (cinematographer, Of Gods and Men)
- Jessica Chastain (actress, The Tree of Life)
- Federica Pontremoli (screenwriter, Habemus Papam)
- Nansun Shi (producer, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame)
- Athina Tsangari (director and producer, Attenberg)
James Francopresents:
- with Susan Ray, the experimental film We Can’t Go Home Again by Nicholas Ray, in the version restored thanks to the contribution of Gucci by the Nicholas Ray Foundation, in collaboration with the EYE Film Institute Netherlands and the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A round table discussion follows with James Franco, Susan Ray, Douglas Gordon, Wim Wenders and Victor Erice.
- Rebel by James Franco, a meditation on film and the iconography of the 20th century
- Sal, the latest film directed by James Franco, screening at the Festival
XVII EuroMediterranean Conference on Cinema curated by UNESCO - OCCAM: Cinema, Social and New Media for a New Mediterranean Citizenship
Special Presentation, Cinema and Human Rights – two days of screenings and meetings on the crucial theme of human rights, presented by Cinecittà Luce, Rai Cinema, Amnesty International, the association Articolo 21, under the patronage of the Ministry for the Cultural Heritage and Activities (Mibac).