The Venice Film Festival on Tuesday is unveiling the films screening at the 80th Biennale, including the movies competing for this year’s Golden Lion.
Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera and Roberto Cicutto, president of La Biennale di Venezia, the umbrella organization that runs the world’s oldest film fest, are unveiling this year’s titles in a ceremony live-streamed on the festival’s website, as well as on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Venice has picked Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance, the controversial director’s first French-language movie, to screen in competition. The feature stars Gallic A-listers Lou de Laage, Valerie Lemercier, Melvil Poupaud and Niels Schneider. Metropolitan has set a Sept. 27 French release date for the film.
If hosting Allen weren’t enough to generate scandal, Venice is doubling down on online controversy by also inviting Roman Polanski to screen his new feature, The Palace. Venice premiered Polanski’s An Officier and A Spy in 2019 (and handed the film the runner-up Jury Prize Silver Lion), and has no problem with the sort of controversy the Polish director generates. Polanski co-wrote the feature, about a wild 1999 New Year’s Eve in a luxurious Swiss hotel, with EO filmmakers Jerzy Skolimowski and Ewa Piaskowska. The film’s international cast includes John Cleese, Luca Barbareschi, Oliver Masucci, Fanny Ardant and Mickey Rourke.
Wes Anderson, fresh off the Cannes premiere of Asteroid City, will be in Venice with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a series of stories inspired by tales from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author Roald Dahl. The feature, which Barbera described as “pure Wes Anderson” co-stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Dev Patel and Ralph Fiennes.
Aggro Dr1ft from Spring Breakers Harmony Korine also secured an out-of-competition slot.
In competition, Luc Besson, another director who has been dogged by scandal of late, will premiere his new, potential comeback feature, Dogman, a drama starring Caleb Landry Jones.
A Royal Affair director Nikolaj Arcel will compete for the Golden Lion with The Promised Land, a period drama starring Mads Mikkelsen. Stephane Brize’s feature Hors-Saison with Alba Rohrwacher and Guillaume Canet and La Bete from Bertrand Bonello, featuring Lea Seydoux and George MacKay also made the competition cut. As did the mafia feature Enea from director Pietro Castellitto.
Damien Chazelle, who premiered La La Land and First Man in competition in Venice, heads up this year’s international jury, with directors Jane Campion, Martin McDonagh, and Laura Poitras also judging the main competition titles.
With the ongoing SAG-AFTRA actors and WGA writers strike preventing top U.S. talent from doing promotional work, this year’s Venice line-up could look substantially different than it would have just two weeks ago. Barbera has already told his staff to prepare a plan B should invited American films not be able to participate in the festival because of the strikes.
Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, a ménage à trois tennis drama starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, was set to open the 2023 Venice Festival in an out-of-competition slot but was pulled last week, after MGM announced it was pushing the release of the R-rated tennis drama to April 26, 2024. Instead, Comandante, an Italian period drama from director Edoardo De Angelis starring Pierfrancesco Favino (The Traitor) will open the fest on August 30. Society of the Snow, J.A. Bayona’s survival thriller, produced for Netflix, will close the 2023 Venice Film Festival on September 9.
Barbera said the program for the 80th festival had already been finalized ahead of the strike, but that the impact of the labor action on the final line-up “has been quite modest” with only Challengers pulling out.
“The other American movies we had invited and have been confirmed and will be present,” he said. He noted that the SAG-AFTRA strikes will mean some “actors and actresses” will not attend but that talent from independent films will be able to come, meaning that the red carpet “will not be empty.”
Individual films could still get special dispensation from SAG-AFTRA to allow actors to do promotional work. The Toronto Film Festival announced its first group of 2023 titles on Monday and they included several star-studded films, including Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money, with Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Shailene Woodley and Seth Rogen; Netflix movies NYAD featuring Jodie Foster and Annette Bening, the Michael Keaton-directed Knox Goes Away, in which he stars alongside Marcia Gay Harden and James Marsden; and Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman of the Hour.
Venice’s Horizons sidebar will include such highlights as Behind the Mountains, a Tunisian drama from director Mohamed Ben Attia, The Red Suitcase, the debut feature from Nepalese filmmaker Fidel Devkota, and Tatami, the new film co-directed by Israel’ Guy Nattiv and Iranian actress-turned-director Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Holy Spider) which tells the true story of an Iranian Judo champion who refused to fight an Israeli competitor.
City of Wind, the feature film follow-up of last year’s Horizons short film winner Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir (Snow in September) will get its world premiere in the Horizons line-up, alongside Hesitation Wound from director Selman Nacar, Simone Massi’s Invelle, The Featherweight by director Robert Kolodny and Heartless, a Brazilian feature from directors Nara Normande and Tiao.
U.S. documentarians Bill and Turner Ross will present their feature debut, Gasoline Rainbow in Horizons. Housekeeping for Beginners from North Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski, En Attendant La Nuit from French director Celeine Rouzet and Shadow of Fire by Japanese director Shin’ya Tsukamoto (Killing, Kotoko) will also screen in the sidebar.
The Horizons Extra section will include the Ukrainian feature Forever Forever from director Anna Buryachkova, the drama Bota Jone from Luana Bajrami, and the Day of the Fight, the directorial debut of actor Jack Huston, a boxing drama starring Ron Perlman, Joe Pesci and John Magaro.
Liam Neeson-starrer In the Land of Saints and Sinners, an Irish-set thriller from director Robert Lorenz, Olma Schnabel’s Pet Shop Boys featuring Willem Dafoe, Jack Irv and Peter Saarsgard, and Indian feature Stolen from director Karan Tejpal, have also secured a Horizons Extra bow.
Also in the line-up are Micaela Ramazzotti’s Felicita, the drama L’Homme D’Argile from Anais Tellenne.
Out of competition, Venice will screen 10 episodes of the French TV series D’Argent et de Sang from directors Xavier Giannoli and Frederic Planchon, featuring Vincent Lindon and Niels Schneider and two episodes of Bosnian drama I Know Your Soul, co-created by Oscar-nominated director Jasmila Zbanic (Quo vadis, Aida?).
Also out of competition, Italian artist Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri will screen the experimental work Amor, the documentary Hollywoodgate, from German director Ibrahim Nash’at, which looks at the first year in Afghanistan under the new rule of the Taliban, and Ryuichi Sakamoto Opus, a look at the late, Oscar-winning composer of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Revenant by his son, Neo Sora. Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, a look at life in a three-star Michelin restaurant from legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman (City Hall, Welfare) also secured a Venice slot.
Barbera also unveiled the documentaries screening in Venice’s special non-fiction sidebar, which will include Michael Gondry’s Do It Yourself.
Venice had been hoping to outshine Cannes with its 80th edition, a tall order, strike or no strike, given the French fest set a high bar this year, with an official selection that included Harrison Ford blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Wes Anderson’s star-studded Asteroid City and Todd Haynes’s May December, as well as a doubling down on international auteurs, with new films from Ken Loach (The Old Oak), Wim Wenders (Perfect Days) and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Monster).
Barbera has more than held his own in recent years. His 2022 selection included several award contenders — Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale with the eventual best actor Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, Todd Field’s Tár, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin — and plenty of splashy scandals, around the likes of Andrew Dominik’s drama Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling with the infamous “spit-gate” incident between stars Chris Pine and Harry Styles.
But it will be a challenge to generate the same level of excitement with Hollywood’s A-list off the red carpet and on the picket line.
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