A Cinephile’s Guide to Venice Film Festival

Written by Filipp Beldushkin

Venice Biennale is probably the most important annual cultural exhibition in the world, covering contemporary art, architecture, music, theatre, dance, and cinema. Venice Film Festival, one of Venice Biennale’s components, is the world’s oldest film festival and is, along with Cannes Film Festival, one of the most prestigious. Venice Film Festival, like other major film festivals, fulfills an important role of connecting filmmakers to audiences, fostering global connections among filmmakers, critics, producers, financiers and distributors. It provides a platform for both emerging talent and established directors to bring global attention to their new work. Venice Film Festival is also, compared to Cannes, much more visitor-friendly. Apart from press and industry accreditations, there are accreditations for students and people under 26 and over 60. It is also possible to buy tickets for all the public screenings of the films. This year I was lucky to be able to visit the Venice Film Festival and I would like to share with you certain notes on all festival-related things: some practical and some film-related.

 

Palazzo del Cinema, Venice, Italy (photo by Filipp Beldiushkin)

Organizational Tips

• I recommend acquiring a cinema accreditation for students (or other relevant category of accreditations), since it allows a person to book seats to both public and accreditation-only screenings. In particular, every morning at PalaBiennale there are screenings of main competition films that premiered on the previous day: I was able to book seats for all of such screenings except for Frankenstein. However, there may be few seats reserved for accreditation holders for public screenings, so even with the accreditation I had to buy tickets for some screenings of films not in the main competition.
• It is advisable to book a hotel room in advance of the festival, preferably on Lido or near to San Marco (there is a special vaporetto from the grounds of the festival to San Marco every 20 minutes). If you stay somewhere else (like I did), it can take more than an hour to get to the festival grounds, which may affect your ability to attend some screenings.
• Venice Film Festival is seen by Hollywood as a  place to premier some of the most-awaited films of the season. At least this year, they were scheduled to premier in the first two thirds of the festival. It is likely that there will be similar scheduling next year, so you should have it in mind when planning your visit, since the screening schedule was published only a couple of weeks before the festival.
• In front of Palazzo del Cinema, the main venue of the festival, there is a red carpet where celebrities appear before the public premieres. Everyone can see them walk through it, but for the best view, some people wait for their appearance from the early morning. It is also possible to gain the attention of the celebrity and receive an autograph.
• One should pay attention not only to the main competition, but also to many interesting films shown out of competition. They are shown in Orizzonti, Orizzonti Short Films, Venice Spotlight, Venice Classics, Biennale College Cinema, Final Cut, International Critics’ Week and Giornatte degli Autori sections.
• Venice Film Festival, like other major film festivals, fulfills an important role of connecting filmmakers to audiences, fostering global connections among filmmakers, critics, producers, financiers and distributors. It also provides a platform for both emerging talent and established directors to bring global attention to their new work.
• All films at Venice Film Festival are shown in their original language with both Italian and English subtitles. Most films are also shown at a couple of cinema theaters in Venice in original language with Italian subtitles during the festival. Afterwards, many of the films are shown at Le vie del cinema in Milan from the end of September to beginning of October.

Amanda Seyfried at the premiere of “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Mona Fastvold (photo by Filipp Beldiushkin)

Film reviews

• This year the Golden Lion was given to Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, an anthology about how children visit the home of their parents and build relationships with them and among themselves. Even though relationship drama is not my cup of tea, I found it to be a surprisingly very warm and charming film.
• The Grand Jury prize went to Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film based around phone calls between a 5-year old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab trapped in a car under fire in Gaza and the Red Crescent volunteers. The Red Crescent go through a lot of effort coordinating an  ambulance trip with the IDF; ambulance workers and Hind Rajab are still shot despite the fact that the trip was coordinated with the Israeli military command. Despite the plenty of the merits of Father Mother Sister Brother, I think The Voice of Hind Rajab deserves the Golden Lion. It is indeed political, yet very subtle. It is a very masterful film that documents the genocide perpetrated by Israel and hopefully, there are many to follow in the vein of films that commemorate the Holocaust.The Special Jury Prize went to Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds, a very elegant black-and-white documentary of life in modern-day Naples, a city which has unfortunately undergone large-scale urban decay. The film shows the world where seawater washes over ancient statues and films about Pompei are screened in abandoned cinema theaters. The film shows the place where as if time has stopped and global events are just echoes: what is left is the guardians of the archaeological museum who ponder on time’s nature and photograph the local Hindu statue of fertility goddess brought to Pompei more than 20 centuries ago.
• Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee is a brilliant energetic musical about the founder of the sect of shakers focused on making the audience empathize with Ann Lee and her followers. It is a rare musical where singing and dancing is organically integrated into the narrative of the film. It is clear Mona Fastvold and her husband Brady Corbet (famous for The Brutalist) are probably one of the most talented emerging filmmakers today.
• Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia is another absurdist masterpiece from this Greek filmmaker, with crucial contribution to its success by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. The film brings to the point of absurdity the concept of not being able to distinguish between truth and lie. Yorgos Lanthimos suggests that only through empathy can humanity overcome the issues it faces. The ending is an unexpected continuation of the topic Lanthimos broached in the credits of the second part of his previous film Kinds of Kindness. 
• Francois Ozon’s The Stranger is a black-and-white adaptation of a  namesake novel by Albert Camus. It shows the main character Meursault suffering from his  indifference to everything human: he even kills a person just because he was blinded by the sun. He is no Nietzschean übermensch nor is he Rodion Raskolnikov; he is just a bastard incapable of taking any responsibility for his actions. After the murder, Meursault goes to the cinema and sees a comedy film built around the phrase “Every condemned must have his head cut off”. This scene, along with guillotine scenes in this film and his The Crime is Mine, shows that the topic of capital punishment definitely intrigues Francois Ozon. Special regard should be given to scenes with Marie played by Rebecca Marder –  they are so full of love and compassion. 
• Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is a technically well-made yet shallow film that is supposed to horrify the audience with the premise of the possibility of a nuclear strike on Chicago, but fails at this task bigly. All it shows is the hustle and bustle, swearing and panic of different US government officials that is only at times funny and satisfying. On the topic of potential nuclear armageddon, Andrei Tarkovsky in Offret and Tom Lehrer in his songs are much more on-point. 
• Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is an engaging adaptation of Mary Shelley’s famous novel, faithful to the spirit of romanticism and Gothic fiction. According to interviews with Guillermo del Toro, he has been fascinated by the novel as a kid, and it indeed feels this way because I found the film quite sentimental. The focus is on father-son relationships (William-Victor Frankenstein; Victor Frankenstein-The Creature) and what makes a human a human and a monster a monster. The film, interestingly, shows a human being more monstrous than the monster. I disagree with this, but I think this unique point of view is what makes this film worthwhile to watch. Mia Goth’s acting, female character costumes, and sets for the scene in the Arctic are also remarkable.
• Alejo Moguillansky’s Pin de Fartie was one of my  most anticipated movies of the festival, and it did not disappoint. It takes Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame and plays with it –  Pin de Fartie is a confusing yet mesmerizing Beckettian metafilm.  Alejo Moguillansky clearly has a musical way of thinking about cinema and this film is built around repetitions and variations of people bidding farewell to each other. Beautiful Swiss scenery and superb acting performance of the director’s daughter Cleo Moguillansky add melancholic flavor to the film. It was produced by El Pampero Cine, a pioneering Argentinean independent filmmaking group, whose goal is to rebel against conventions of narrative and both commercial and art-house cinema. 
• Vladlena Sandu’s Memory is a very subtle autobiographical film about childhood amid the Chechen War. It is very much in spirit of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s films –  it is built around visual images and symbols that cannot be easily read, but that add up to a very poetic whole rooted in national culture. It also has an unusual narration tempo, which makes the movie at times light and at times eerie. I disagree with some of the politics of the film, but it did not prevent me from enjoying it a lot.
• Giulio Bertelli’s Agon is an unusual sport film with narration carried by breathtaking cinematography. It is about how 3 sportswomen in judo, fencing, and shooting prepare for and cope with failure at the fictional Ludoj 2024 games. Giulio Bertelli, a son of Miuccia Prada and a sportsman himself, is able to show nuance of professional non-mainstream sport with clear love for it. 
• Stephan Komandarev’s Made in EU is a brilliant Bulgarian social drama that uses the onset of the COVID pandemic to expose “the pandemic of globalization”, as the director put it. The movie  shows the underbelly of capitalism: village people blame an oppressed woman (an intense role played by the wonderful Gergana Pletnyova, who was told by the director to play using her eyes) and her son for the COVID outbreak, because they need someone local to blame for the global issues beyond their control. As the director put it, the happy end of the film is if people leave the cinema pondering on questions stated in the movie. I agree with him –  good films should provoke people to think about the fundamental questions.
• Polen Ly’s Becoming Human financed by Biennale as part of Biennale College Cinema is a lovely Cambodian film that is full of pondering on suffering, past, and present from Buddhist point of view. Vincho Nchogu’s One Woman One Bra, also a film in Biennale College Cinema section, is set in rural Kenya and focuses on how commercialization corrupts human soul and society. I find it awesome that the Venice Biennale supports emerging filmmakers in making their first films, contributing to the development of global film culture. 
• Cedric Jimenez’s Dog 51, the closing film of the festival, is a quite good French action sci-fi movie  about an AI system used by police that gets out of control and two  brave police officers that save the utopian society from its grip. These two officers fall in love with each other and one of them dies in the end, probably so that the ending is not too optimistic. The highlight of this film is a scene where  the two main characters  sing together “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes. The message of the director of Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera who selected this film as the closing one is clearly that humanity should control AI.