Coolness

A perfect balance between classics and new entries today at the Lido, with a female presence behind the camera that is anything but taken for granted. Kathryn Bigelow returns – the queen of tense, rigorous cinema and the first woman to win an Academy Award, in 2008, with The Hurt Locker, which premiered right here in Venice. With A House of Dynamite (Venice 82), Bigelow once again treads the line of American and global fears, telling the story of a race against time to stop a missile launched against the United States. The cast includes Idris Elba, Jason Clarke (who worked with Bigelow in Zero Dark Thirty), and Rebecca Ferguson. Also competing is François Ozon, with L’Étranger, adapted from Camus.
The second female director at the Lido today, Sofia Coppola, presents a portrait of fashion designer and close collaborator Marc Jacobs: Marc by Sofia (Out of Competition – Non Fiction) promises to move between glamour and intimacy, surface and depth, in the vein of Coppola’s finest work. Another American heavyweight, Gus Van Sant– recipient of the Campari Passion for Film award – appears Out of Competition with Dead Man’s Wire, based on the true story of a private, armed vendetta: in 1977 a small businessman held the head of a real estate credit company at gunpoint for sixty-three hours. Much anticipation also surrounds two debuts making the leap from music videos to narrative cinema. A master of perspective and of a striking analog style that rejects CGI in favor of complexity, the British director Oscar Hudson – showing at SIC with Straight Circle – has already made a name for himself with brilliantly conceived music videos such as Bonobo’s No Reason and Radiohead’s Lift. On the urban-aesthetic front, with bold excesses and auteurist turns that brought him to prominence through his videos for Bad Bunny, Colombian director Stillz makes his feature debut with Barrio Triste (Orizzonti), a story rooted in the social reality of his country. Cool.