Three years after winning the Grand Jury Prize with The Hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino returns to Venice, opening the Competition with the crepuscular, “presidential” love story La grazia. The film also marks his eighth collaboration with Toni Servillo, who by now can rightly be called Sorrentino’s alter ego. Starring alongside him is Roman actress Anna Ferzetti, recently seen in Ferzan Özpetek’s Diamonds. In a decidedly spiritual sense, “grace” is also what touches the protagonist of the film launching Orizzonti: Mother, directed by Macedonian filmmaker Teona Strugar Mitevska (who already appeared in Venice in 2022). Here the mother in question is Mother Teresa of Calcutta, portrayed at a personal turning point immediately after World War II. This time, after Geraldine Chaplin and Olivia Hussey in two TV movies, she is played by Noomi Rapace – quite a leap in character from Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium trilogy. From lands that for more than three years have endured the scourge of Russia’s war of aggression comes the opening title of the Venice Days: Memory, the feature debut of Vladlena Sandu, born in Crimea – the same place where the young protagonist comes from. It is a story of oppression and yearning for freedom, shot not without difficulty under the eyes of Moscow’s occupying authorities. But the opening day begins under the sign of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, awarded to one of Europe’s great auteurs: 82-year-old Werner Herzog. Between the 1960s and 1980s, alongside Wenders, Kluge, Fassbinder, von Trotta, Reitz and others, Herzog stood as a standard-bearer of the New German Cinema. A “soldier,” as he defines himself, but also an explorer and true adventurer of the big screen.
