Venice Film Festival: Most Anticipated Films
by KM, Movie Lightbox
The fall film festival season is set to kick off today on the Lido island in Venice with prestige and international films premiering for the next 11 days. After staging a physical event last year right in the midst of pandemic, this year’s edition of the Venice International Film Festival will be implementing “Green Pass” measures, health guidelines to guarantee the safety of all accredited visitors and audiences at the festival.
With hopes of resurgence in the film industry, the 78th edition of the festival will be presenting films from renowned auteurs such as Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Pablo Larraín and Paolo Sorrentino. One of the high profile titles set to have its World Premiere at the festival is Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, a science fiction epic film adaptation of the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert, starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Jason Momoa, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem, Rebecca Ferguson and Josh Brolin. With the struggling results of the summer season box office, the viability of the Dune’s release strategy - playing in theatres and streaming platform on the same day, is still in question.
The jury for the Venezia 78 Competition will be presided by South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho and will bestow the Golden Lion, the festival’s top award, given recently to films such as The Shape of Water, Roma, Joker and Nomadland.
“Overall, I feel I can state that the program of this 78th Festival is proof of the extraordinary vitality of contemporary cinema. Far from being felled by the coronavirus and by the technological revolution that is destined to radically change the rules of the game with which we have cohabited for its entire first century of life, cinema will continue to amaze, astound, captivate, and affect.”, said Alberto Barbera, Artistic Director of Venice Film Festival.
Here’s the list of our most anticipated films playing in Competition:
THE POWER OF THE DOG (Jane Campion)
Synopsis
Charismatic rancher Phil Burbank inspires fear and awe in those around him. When his brother brings home a new wife and her son, Phil torments them until he finds himself exposed to the possibility of love.
THE HAND OF GOD (Paolo Sorrentino)
Synopsis
The story of a young man’s heartbreak and liberation in Naples, Italy. It’s the 1980s and 17-year old Fabietto Schisa might be an awkward Italian teen struggling to find his place, but he finds joy in an amazing family who love life, relish mischief and take deep pleasure in meddling in one another’s complicated relationships. Then comes a pair of events that alter everything. One is the triumphant arrival in Naples of a god-like athletic legend: high-flying soccer idol Maradona, who has Fabietto, and the whole scrappy city, feeling a pride that once seemed impossible. The other is an inconceivable accident that will drop the bottom out of Fabietto’s world—setting his future in motion. Seemingly saved by Maradona, touched by chance or the hand of God, Fabietto wrestles with the nature of fate, the confusion of loss, and the intoxicating freedom of being alive. In his most movingly personal film, Sorrentino takes audiences on a sensory journey bursting with the contrasts of tragedy and comedy, love and desire, absurdity and beauty, as Fabietto finds the only way out of total catastrophe through his own imagination.
PARALLEL MOTHERS (Pedro Almodóvar)
Synopsis
Two women coincide in a hospital room where they are going to give birth. Both are single and became pregnant by accident. Janis, middle-aged, doesn’t regret it and is exultant. The other, Ana, an adolescent, is scared, repentant and traumatised. Janis tries to encourage her while they move like sleepwalkers along the hospital corridors. The few words they exchange in those hours will create a very close link between the two, which by chance develops and becomes complicated, changing their lives in a decisive way.
SPENCER (Pablo Larraín)
Synopsis
The marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles has long since grown cold. Though rumors of affairs and a divorce abound, peace is ordained for the Christmas festivities at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate. There’s eating and drinking, shooting and hunting. Diana knows the game. But this year, things will be a whole lot different. Spencer is an imagining of what might have happened during those few fateful days.
OFFICIAL COMPETITION (Gastón Duprat, Mariano Cohn)
Synopsis
In search of significance and social prestige, a billionaire businessman decides to make a film to leave his mark. To do so, he hires the best: a stellar team formed by famous filmmaker Lola Cuevas and two renowned actors, both enormously talented, but with even bigger egos: the Hollywood actor Félix Rivero and radical theater thespian Iván Torres. Both legends, but not exactly the best of friends. Through a series of increasingly eccentric challenges set by Lola, Felix and Iván must face not only each other, but also their own legacies.
SUNDOWN (Michel Franco)
Synopsis
From writer-director Michel Franco comes a simmering, suspenseful sharp jolt: Alice and Neil Bennett are the core of a wealthy British family on vacation in Acapulco with younger members Colin and Alexa until a distant emergency cuts their trip short. When one relative disrupts the family’s tight-knit order, surprising tensions rise to the fore.
THE LOST DAUGHTER (Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Synopsis
Alone on a seaside vacation, Leda becomes consumed with a young mother and daughter as she watches them on the beach. Unnerved by their compelling relationship, (and their raucous and menacing extended family), Leda is overwhelmed by her own memories of the terror, confusion and intensity of early motherhood. An impulsive act shocks Leda into the strange and ominous world of her own mind, where she is forced to face the unconventional choices she made as a young mother and their consequences.
IL BUCO (Michelangelo Frammartino)
Synopsis
During the economic boom of the 1960s, Europe’s highest building is being built in Italy’s prosperous North. At the other end of the country, young speleologists explore Europe’s deepest cave in the untouched Calabrian hinterland. The bottom of the Bifurto Abyss, 700 meters below Earth, is reached for the first time. The intruders’ venture goes unnoticed by the inhabitants of a small neighbouring village, but not by the old shepherd of the Pollino plateau whose solitary life begins to interweave with the group’s journey. Another work of nearly wordless organic beauty that touches on the mystical, Il buco chronicles a visit through unknown depths of life and nature and parallels two great voyages to the interior.
ON THE JOB: THE MISSING 8 (Erik Matti)
Synopsis
Inspired by true events, the film chronicles the story of Sisoy Salas, a corrupt journalist seeking justice for his colleagues, and convict Roman Rubio, a hired gun who is regularly brought out of prison to perform assassinations.
Sisoy has always been staunch defender of the government and the popular local mayor Pedring Eusebio. But when his colleagues from the local newspaper—including his long-time friend Arnel Pangan and his innocent son—go missing, Sisoy is forced to rethink his allegiances and confront his own political beliefs.
Meanwhile, the prisoner and occasional assassin Roman gets sentenced to life imprisonment for a crime that he did not commit. Unwilling to spend the rest of his life as a hired killer, Roman begins plotting to take back his freedom by any means possible.
Battling against dirty bureaucracy and a surge of fake news manufactured against the victims, Sisoy persistently investigates about the fate of the Missing 8. Slowly, he inches closer to the truth, earning him the ire of Mayor Eusebio and his powerful political machinery.
Sisoy and Roman’s paths are set on a deadly collision course when Sisoy becomes Roman’s next target.
THE BOX (Lorenzo Vigas)
Synopsis
Hatzin, a young teenager from Mexico City, travels to collect the remains of his father, which have been found in a communal grave amidst the huge skies and empty landscape of Northern Mexico. But a casual encounter with a man who shares a physical resemblance with his father fills him with doubts and hope about his parent’s true whereabouts.
The 78th Venice International Film Festival runs from September 1 - 11.
Images courtesy of Venice Film Festival