The Festival takes shape with a line-up poised between masters and new bets: from Nanni Moretti to Danny Boyle, from Werner Herzog to Kore-eda, through to Wenders and Guadagnino, the Lido once again turns to cinema as a way of looking at the present.
The Venice Film Festival confirms itself as a territory of consecrations and discoveries, a space where established masters and new names share the same horizon. Presenting the line-up of the 83rd edition, Alberto Barbera insisted on cinema as an extraordinary instrument for understanding reality, the only context in which the real can escape mere chronicle and become stories, forms, narratives. The result is an exceptionally rich programme, bringing many friends of the Festival back to the Lido while also betting on authors ready to spread their wings, like the herons on the poster designed once again this year by Manuele Fior.
Opening the Festival will be Danny Boyle’s Ink, in Competition, written by James Graham and starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy: the story of the rise of the tabloid The Sun under the direction of Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb.
There are five Italian titles in all competing for the Golden Lion. Edoardo De Angelis presents Il fuoco che ti porti dentro, based on the novel of the same name by Antonio Franchini, with Vanessa Scalera, Lino Musella, Elena Radonicich, Ivana Lotito and Tommaso Ragno: a fierce and comic portrait of an overwhelming mother and a family bond that burns without consuming itself. Andrea Pallaoro arrives with The Echo Chamber, starring Luca Marinelli, Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon, the final cinematic trace of Bernardo Bertolucci, from an idea by the master and written with Ludovica Rampoldi and Ilaria Bernardini. Paolo Strippoli signs L’estranea, with Jasmine Trinca, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Adriano Giannini and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, confirming after La valle dei sorrisi a path within genre cinema, here pushed towards broader ambitions. Marco Bechis, instead, returns to the wounds of Argentina’s dictatorship with Ritorno a Buenos Aires, starring Adriano Giannini and Ana Celentano, the story of a former detainee called years later to testify against the torturers of the clandestine detention centre Garage Olimpo, where Bechis himself was imprisoned in the 1970s.
Among the major international returns are Werner Herzog with Bucking Fastard, a story of extreme symbiosis starring sisters Kate and Rooney Mara, with Orlando Bloom and Domhnall Gleeson; Lee Chang-dong with Ga-neung-han sa-rang (Possible Love), produced by Netflix and inspired by one of the chapters of Dekalog; and Hirokazu Kore-eda with Look Back, a live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga, shot in 35mm and centred on two girls brought together by drawing.
The Competition also welcomes Casey Affleck with Company, set in a remote community in the United States and starring, among others, Nick Nolte and Ben Mendelsohn; Stéphane Brizé with Un bon petit soldat, a new foray into the world of work with Alba Rohrwacher and Vincent Lindon; Martin McDonagh with Wild Horse Nine, a Chilean adventure on the eve of the coup against Pinochet, with John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey; Lance Oppenheim with Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson as an unscrupulous television host; and Florian Zeller with Bunker, a moral thriller with Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Stephen Graham, Paul Dano and Patrick Schwarzenegger. Nicolas Pariser signs Un peu avant minuit, with Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni, Golshifteh Farahani and Anaïs Demoustier, while Shinya Tsukamoto brings to the Lido Nelson san, anata ha hito wo koroshimashitaka? (Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?), a story of war, trauma and memory.
Completing the picture are Ali Asgari with Kami nour (A Bit of Light), May el-Toukhy with Kvinde Ukendt (Woman Unknown), Cédric Kahn with 15/18 A Place To Heal and Ilya Khrzhanovsky with Dau. It is a broad Competition, crossed by major returns and off-centre bets, which seems to reaffirm Venice’s dual vocation: to recognise the masters and, in the same movement, to seek out where cinema is changing skin.
Outside the Competition, Venezia 83 broadens its field, bringing together auteur cinema, documentary, reflection on cinema itself, and new forms of storytelling. Open – Out of Competition welcomes Gianni Amelio, Lav Diaz, Mario Martone, and Paul Schrader, but it is in non-fiction that the programme captures some of the strongest trajectories of the present: Alex Gibney takes on Elon Musk, Amos Gitai builds with The Road to Jericho a visual poem against war, Sergei Loznitsa reworks Soviet archive materials in Imperium, while Wim Wenders dedicates From Inside Out to the architecture of Peter Zumthor. Alongside them, documentaries on Oasis (the Gallagher brothers will be at the Lido), on Kabuki theatre by Takashi Miike, on the boatbuilders of Maine, on the American riders of Union Town, and on Russian journalists in exile compose a map crossed by labour, memory, conflicts, and resistance.
Within Film on Films section, Luca Guadagnino’s Joie de vivre, seven hours devoted to Bernardo Bertolucci, becomes the monumental title of a section that looks at cinema as living matter, alongside portraits of Nino Rota and Seijun Suzuki. Among the shorts, standouts include Flesh Impact by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Halayon (Wild Asparagus) by Avi Mograbi, and They’re Here by Laura Poitras and Rachel Mueller, featuring striking, previously unseen images of the recent protests against ICE in the United States.
Venezia Spotlight presents eight films conceived for a more direct dialogue with the public, from Hombre al agua by Gael García Bernal to Serpenti by Roberto De Paolis Maino, from Földszint (Ground Floor) by Gábor Reisz to Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing by Erik Shirai. Orizzonti, finally, opens with La ragazza con la Leica by Alina Marazzi and, alongside the new Italian works by Anna Foglietta, Edoardo Gabbriellini, and Tommaso Landucci, presents an international panorama stretching from the Thailand of Phuttiphong Aroonpheng to the China of Michelle Zhou.
