LIMELIGHT
2025

It all comes down to time – the decisive, extra time – in the selection of films screening today and tomorrow. In Competition, the highly anticipated Silent Friend by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi is a meditation on deep time: a Ginkgo Biloba, witness to lives and centuries, provides the backdrop for a story that intertwines science, soul, nature, and the waiting of a neuroscientist (Tony Leung Chiu-wai). Tsai Ming-liang stops time itself, stretching it into long silent sequences. In Hui jia (Back Home), his lens turns to memory and return, to a cyclical time revealed through his unmistakable contemplative gaze...
They are among us, sometimes within us. Insidious, fascinating, revealing. These are the monsters wandering freely today at the Lido, starting with those explored in the highly anticipated Netflix series Il Mostro (Out of Competition – Series), centered on the investigation into the “Monster of Florence” and directed by Stefano Sollima, a skillful storyteller of crime and true crime. “Monstrous” too are the photographs of Ferdinando Scianna – for their cultural weight, evocative power, and ability to unveil the unspeakable and the shadow. Ferdinando Scianna – The Photographer of the Shadow (Out of Competition) is the tribute that the excellent Roberto Andò has dedicated to the great master from Bagheria, a leading author of Magnum Photos and inimitable poet of an ancestral and ritual Sicilian identity. Also in Competition, another monstrosity: the one that perhaps lurks in the personality of the protagonist of Elisa by Leonardo Di Costanzo, who is serving a sentence for killing her sister and burning her body. Starring in the new work by the author of the rightly acclaimed Ariaferma are Barbara Ronchi and Valeria Golino...
The second week at the Lido shows no signs of slowing down: star-studded casts, bold productions, and highly anticipated works dominate today’s lineup. Leading the way is In the Hand of Dante, Julian Schnabel’s latest effort, which will receive the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award. A constellation of stars shines on this adaptation of Nick Tosches’s novel about the discovery of the original manuscript of the Divine Comedy: Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, John Malkovich, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Louis Cancelmi, Italians Franco Nero and Sabrina Impacciatore, plus the versatile Benjamin Clementine, apparently making a definitive break from music. Absent are Gal Gadot and Gerald Butler, criticized for ties to the Israeli government. The voice of Gaza is brought by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania with The Voice of Hind Rajab, backed by Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jonathan Glazer...
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...

LIMELIGHT
2024

Curtains are about to set on the Venice Film Festival. The upcoming TV series M – Il figlio del secolo by Joe Wright is maybe one of the most anticipated premieres in town. Starring as Benito Mussolini an amazing Luca Marinelli. Closing the Competition are two final chapters of as many trilogies. The first is Love (after Sex and Dream) by Norwegian Dag Johan Haugerud – a film on changing sexual mores, and on male homosexuality in particular. The second is an elegy: Youth: Homecoming by Chinese documentarist Wang Bing, a film on the crushed dreams of exploited textile workers...
Reality barges in in a million different shapes. Let’s start with an out of competition feature, an ‘unauthorized’ documentary by Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova. Her Russians at War about the current war in Ukraine seeks to steer clear of propaganda on either side, focusing instead on Russian soldiers’ bewilderment and disillusionment. From neighbouring Georgia comes filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, who participates in the main Competition with her film April, the story of an abortionist midwife who defies law for humanitarian reasons. Iddu by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, starring an unrecognizable Elio Germano...
Here comes the day of the Joker. Todd Phillips is looking for strike two with Joker: Folie à deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and a spectacular Lady Gaga. Will the sequel earn Phillips his second Golden Lion? Coming up against it in the main Competition is Diva Futura by Italian-Texan actress and filmmaker Giulia Louise Steigerwalt: the story of the famous porn talent scout Riccardo Schicchi, played by Pietro Castellitto. There’s one actor that we can tell wouldn’t mind bringing home a Lion, we are talking of Vincent Lindon, who plays the part of a widowed father in The Quiet Son by sister-and-sister filmmaking duo Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin...
Former Agent 007 Daniel Craig in queer version – desperate and addicted in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer – is one of the most anticipated performances in Competition. The film faces off Harvest by Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, adapted from Jim Crace’s novel of the same name and starring Caleb Landry Jones. Out of Competition, the montage documentary 2073 by Asif Kapadia imagines what the world will look like in fifty years. Spoiler: not well at all. Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz worked on the infamous case of Belgian serial rapist and killer Marc Dutroux, who inflamed the country...

LIMELIGHT
2023

Transitions and unexpected changes are at the heart of the last three titles in Competition. Kobieta Z... (Woman of), by the Polish filmmakers Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, is the painful story of a father who day after day experiences more discomfort with his identity. In Hors-saison by Stéphane Brizé, Guillaume Canet and Alba Rohrwacher play a couple who coincidentally find themselves at a spa years after their separation...
A kind of magical realism opens the Competition. Holly, by Belgian director Fien Troch, tells the story of a teenager with unique premonitory and beneficial powers. With Paradise Is Burning, Mika Gustafson follows the struggles of three sisters abandoned by their mother. Adolescence is also the main topic explored in Gasoline Rainbow by Bill and Turner Ross, where a group of five teenagers embarks on a great escape in a van...
In the competition today, Matteo Garrone’s Me Captain, the highly anticipated epic of Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, two friends who leave Dakar, cross the desert, survive the Libyan hell, and finally embark for Europe. Ava DuVernay follows with Origin, based on Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson...
With Enea, Pietro Castellitto embarks on an ambitious film, a story of friendship and downfall. Shot semi-covertly, Green Border by Agnieszka Holland portrays the conditions of refugees in the forest on the border between Poland and Belarus. Richard Linklater's Hit Man delves into the story of Gary Johnson, an undercover investigator for the police. A visionary and true maverick director, Shinya Tsukamoto, returns to the consequences of war with Shadow of Fire...

LIMELIGHT
2022

From the prison that currently houses him, Jafar Panahi talks to us about an Iran that knows no peace in No Bears, which sees him in a quasi-autobiography interpretation. Our Ties also sees director Roschdy Zem starring as himself, as does talented pianist Tymoteusz Bies in Bread and Salt, the latter directed by Damian Kocur...
A myriad words and miles of film, fiction and non-, have been spent on Marilyn Monroe. Fifty years since her death, Andrew Dominik set out to explore, more than the myth of Marilyn, Norma Jeane’s inner life in his latest feature film, Blonde, starring Ana de Armas. The film builds upon Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, also titled Blonde...
After an amazing debut with The Father, Florian Zeller is back with a symmetrical work: The Son, a whirlwind of a story that uproots a borderline family, starring Anthony Hopkins, Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, and Vanessa Kirby. Casey Affleck and Zooey Deschanel walk the red carpet for Dreamin‘ Wild by Bill Pohlad, the human and musical story of Donnie and Joe Emerson...
The outlook on Italian cinema grows wider thanks to Gianni Amelio’s Il signore delle formiche, inspired by a real criminal case mounted against a homosexual professor in 1960s Italy, accused of ‘brainwashing’ youth. Joana Hogg worked on a recurrent theme at the Festival: mother-daughter relationships, in the shape of a disquieting ghost story: The Eternal Daughter...
VENEZIA NEWS #309-310

VeNewsletter

Ogni settimana / Every week

il meglio della programmazione culturale di Venezia / the best of Venice's cultural life

VENEZIA NEWS #309-310

VeNewsletter

Ogni settimana

il meglio della programmazione culturale
di Venezia