By Moira Sullivan.
Venice is the oldest film festival in which artistic films that abandon the safe predictability of conventional narratives are often rewarded. This year’s festival featured fifty-two world and two international premieres. The festival has expanded with a need for larger facilities, and has created a “light market” for the film industry since film festivals, distributors and producers are beginning to rely on A-level festival markets for access to new films and industry screenings before press screenings.
For the second year, Alberto Barbera is at the helm of the festival as artistic director replacing the longest standing director Marco Mueller. Changes in Italian politics and a new board headed by Paolo Baratta, the president of the Venice Biennale, put Barbera back in command where he served from 1999 to 2001.
The 70th Venice Film Festival, running from August 28th to September 7th, awarded the Golden Lion this year to the inventive Italian documentary Sacro Gra by Gianfranco Rosi. The imaginative design and subject matter was appealing to this year’s jury presided over by Bernardo Bertolucci and composed of Andrea Arnold, Renato Berta, Carrie Fisher, Martina Gedeck, Jiang Wen, Pablo Larraín, Virginie Ledoyen, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Rosi was especially pleased with the award since this is the first time the festival has opened up the Venezia official competition to the documentary form.
The “Gra” in the film’s title speaks to a 68-kilometer motorway that lies on the periphery of Rome, an acronym that stands for “Grande Raccordo Anulare” (translation: “Great Ring Junction”). It was designed by and named for Eugenio Gra. In the film, Rosi travels in his minivan to speak with people who live along the ring. The director calls them “representatives of the New World”: the eel fisherman Cesare; the nobleman from Piemonte and his daughter, Paolo and Amelia; the paramedic Roberto; the tree doctor Francesco; the prince and his consort, Filippo and Xsenia; and the actor Gaetano. Rosi’s ambition was to study the identity of contemporary Rome. The film is a part of the “Sacro Gra project”, a multi-disciplinarian study of modern Rome established by urbanist and landscape architect Nicolò Bassetti. The project will create a map of stories, landscapes, and people, while using the Gra as the focal point. So it is not only a film but a multimedia project on the order of Peter Greenaway.
Other hightlights this year include the American director William Friedkin, best known for his film The Exorcist (1973), being chosen to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The festival also featured the screening of Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki’s final film Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises). The protagonist of the anime, Jiro Horikoshi, dreams of flying and later becomes one of the best aeronautical engineers of the world. The film is about his life and the important historical events he experienced, including Japan’s entry into World War II. In many of Miyazaki’s films, the director underscores a pacifist leaning through the depiction of war, often involving scenes of aircraft, and Kaze Tachinu is no different. The director is aware that Jiro designed the prototype for the Zero fighter plane used in the attack on Pearl Harbor; in fact, Miyazaki’s family also worked on parts of it. His comments at the press conference cleared up any mystery about his intentions with the film—namely, Kaze Tachinu is not meant as an anti-Japanese statement, as some may have claimed, but as a statement against all violence.
Alexandros Avranas won the Silver Lion for Miss Violence. The Greek narrative concerns the suicide of an 11-year-old girl after her own birthday party. Avranas explores what made the girl do it and why she kept silent about it before her death. The disturbing scenario follows a new wave of Greek filmmakers (e.g. Dogtooth (2009)) creating scenarios about dangerously volatile nuclear families. The patriarch of this family is said to symbolize the injustices of society, one factor being the economic collapse of the Greek economy. The symbolic nature of attacks on children, used as a way to illuminate society’s shortcomings, evoke the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini. This is especially true of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), in which Italian youth are subjected to torture, symbolizing what the country experienced under father figure Mussolini’s fascist regime. Themis Panou won the best actor award (Coppa Volpi) for his role as the patriarch in Miss Violence.
The 82 year old veteran Italian actress Elena Cotta, with only three spoken lines in Albanian, won the best actress award (Coppa Volpi) for her role in A Street in Palermo (Via Castellana Bandiera, directed by Emma Dante). A hit with Venice critics, the film is about two women, who have come to Palermo for a wedding, engaged in a “Mexican standoff”—each refusing to move her car on Via Castellana Bandiera. In one car, Rosa (Dante) and her passenger Clara (Alba Rohrwacher) are a lesbian couple on the rocks. The second car driven by Samira (Cotta) hosts the extended Calafirore family: parents, grandparents, and wailing kids. This marks the second film in the Venezia 70 competition about roadways.
According to Tsai Ming-liang, Stray Dogs will be his last feature (the director is reportedly tired of the labor involved in producing quality film). Causing some controversy, Dogs hails from Taiwan but since the Italian government does not recognize Taiwan as a country, the festival was required by law to list the film from Chinese Taipei—otherwise Stray Dogs would not have been allowed to compete in the festival. Fifty-five year old Tsai, who is from Malaysia and grew up in Taiwan, won the Grand Jury Prize for his narrative about a father and his two children who live on the margins of Taipei society.
Paul Schrader and jury Catherine Corsini, Leonardo Di Costanzo, Golshifteh Farahani, Frédéric Fonteyne, Kseniya Rappoport, and Amr Waked awarded the films in the Orizzonti division.
Eastern Boys won for best film, featuring a complex and provocative narrative about a gang of East European undocumented immigrants that plunder a middle-aged Frenchman, played Olivier Rabourdin, who tries to pick up one of the boys at Gare du Nord. Meanwhile, one film the critics walked out of at Venice won special mention—Amiel Courtin-Wilson and Michael Cody’s Ruin, a film about a misfit Cambodian couple (prostitute and thief/murderer). It pushes the envelope with scenes of abuse, but Courtin-Wilson’s body of work is not thin on social injustice topics (Chasing Buddha (2000)) and Cody has worked on cross cultural cinema projects in Australia and Asia. The crew volunteered to work on the film and address in a non-didactic way the issue of genocide in Cambodia.
The special “Orizzonti Award for Innovative Content” went to Mahi va Gorbeh by Shahram Mokri, an astonishing feature in one continuous take of 237 minutes. The setting is winter solstice, during which Iranian university students gather for a kite festival at the shore of a lake without any wind. The film’s evolution into a tale of murder and the undead is creepy and chilling, based on a true story in which food was served in the Iranian countryside containing human flesh.
A selection of films by emerging filmmakers in the Biennale College section is a special event created by Biennale di Venezia and Gucci last year. Three films—Yuri Esposito, Memphis, and Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy—won production grants from this new higher education workshop for the development and production of micro-budget full-length feature films (150 000 €). Directors and producers from all over the world can apply for the competitive workshop. It must be the director’s first or second film and the producer must have three audiovisual projects distributed or presented at festivals.
“Venice Days,” modeled after the Cannes Director’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), awarded Kill Your Darlings by John Krokidas best film, a feature about the early days of beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who parted ways after a brutal murder. Krokidas uses a contemporary film noir style to tell the story.
Swedish artist Anna Odell won the FIPRESCI prize from the “Venice International Film Critics Week,” organized by the National Union of Italian Film Critics, for Återträffen (The Reunion). Odell became an overnight sensation in Sweden in 2009 for faking a suicide attempt on a Stockholm bridge for her final project at the Stockholm School of Fine Arts. The film consisted of interviews with mental health professionals in Sweden, with medium shots of the gurney that transported her to the psych ward. Her project brought up the ethical question of how far one can go to make a point (certainly nothing new to the documentary form since Nanook of the North [1922]). Still, Odell was fined by a Stockholm district court, and now her filmmaking style has morphed into the hybrid Återträffen, a film about Odell meeting the former classmates who had once bullied her at a 20th year reunion. Since Odell was not even invited to the real reunion, she made a fictional film of her classmates, while reading a letter to the actual bullies. The subject of bullying at work and school is huge in Sweden and received a seal of artistic approval from Venice.
The 70th Venice Film Festival confirms its legacy as a festival with a clearly defined artistic stamp, as well as proven stature as a form for groundbreaking innovation in cinema. For ten days there is nothing but exciting and enchanting cinema in a city that sublimely mirrors these qualities.
Moira Sullivan is an international FIPRESCI and FEODORA film critic and scholar. She teaches film studies at City College of San Francisco.