Venice
The jury of this 90th edition of the Venice Festival has saved a festival full of marketing and surrendered to Hollywood cinema. In the midst of a complex situation for theaters and also for auteur cinema, the oldest event in the world has opted for Netflix cinema and films in which American stars abound, abandoning European cinema and auteur cinema that here he had always found a place. However, the jury has chosen to celebrate the little dissident cinema of this edition, the one that uses aesthetics and art to approach an inhospitable reality, such as the one experienced by Iran, precarious women, or the victims of pharmaceutical companies.
Thus, the Golden Lion has been won by the powerful documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, by Laura Poitras. A gesture that says many things, because in an edition full of films with both marketing and Bardo, The Whale o Blonde, the jury prefers a much smaller and unknown film. Risky decision, since it is not usual for a documentary film to win. It is the second time that it happens in the history of the Mostra, in ninety years, after Gianfranco Rossi achieved victory with Holy Gra in 2013. But in addition, this Golden Lion speaks of a social and economic problem, of a political problem.
Poitras’s is an original and political bet, which mixes the past and present of the epidemics that a city has experienced. First, that of AIDS in the eighties, then the opioid crisis. It does so through the photographer Nan Goldin, an artist who immortalized the queer New York of the seventies and eighties, and a great activist, who has been involved in uncovering the involvement of the Sacker family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, started the epidemic. of opiates with its blockbuster drug, OxyContin. Curiously, Dopesickthe series that deals with this same issue, which has claimed some 500,000 lives in the country in 25 years in the United States, ends the protests in a museum where Goldin herself appears.
A film that is born from the intimate, from the meeting on weekends in a living room of the photographer and the director, and ends up being a defense of citizen struggle, activism and a defense against large corporations and against prejudice. Poitras won the Oscar for another documentary, Citizenfour, shot in a Hong Kong hotel room where Edward Snowden shows reporters leaked documents about surveillance by US intelligence. Poitras, who raised the award emotionally, called for the release of Jafar Panahi, the Iranian filmmaker. The director has behind her a long career as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, which she has been very critical of her government, something that has taken its toll on her. “We have to make this millionaire family fall for everything they have done,” the flamboyant winner of the Golden Lion said on stage.
The second prize, the Silver Lion, Saint Omer, by filmmaker Alice Diop, until now known for documentaries such as We or La mort de Danton, who has presented her first fiction film in Venice, also speaks about reality, documentary film and fiction. . In it, she also maintains that vocation of approaching reality, of capturing the minute by minute of a trial, that of a young mother convicted of having killed her daughter. The film is a reinterpretation of the myth of Medea from feminism, which speaks of the ability to judge, about the definition of victim and victimizer, identity and immigration and motherhood. One of the most powerful French films that, as happened last year with the winner of the Golden Lion, The Event, has once again escaped Cannes.
Another political and artistic decision of the jury has been to reward Jafar Panahi, in jail since July, serving a six-year prison sentence, with the Special Jury Prize, although perhaps he knows little about this mention for a film that combines political ambition and cinematographic. Winner of the Golden Lion in 2000 for The Circle, the filmmaker has been suffering from government censorship for twelve years and has tried to continue making films, either from home, like This is not a movie, or from a car, like Taxi Tehran. In No bears, it is one more step on that road to show fiction cannot be separated from reality, nor reality from fiction. Panahi imposes on himself a greater physical, artistic and political challenge than in his last films. Panahi proposes shooting a film -about an immigrant couple- remotely, by Zoom, on the border between Turkey and Iran.
Hopelessness and uneasiness are also present in Bones and All, the film by Luca Guadagnino, which has given him the award for best direction. Starring Thimotée Chalamet and Taylor Russell, winner of the Marcello Mastroianni Award for young performers, it tells a love story of two misfits, two cannibals who survive in a hostile world, Reagan’s deep America. With its recession, its identity crisis and where love is the only thing to hold on to. Guadagnino dedicated the award to Panahi, minutes after the stalls stood up as a gesture against his conviction.
If the example of Jafar Panahi puts in trouble those who firmly maintain that the author and his circumstances are totally unrelated and separable from the work, another film that has managed to be in the winners of this edition has an impact on it: TÁR. Few awards are as clear and incontestable as the Volpi Cup for Cate Blanchett, who already has two victories here in Venice. The first was achieved with I’m not there, a film by the filmmaker Todd Haynes, in which he played the Bob Dylan of the years 1964 and 1965. This second victory was achieved by Tar, a fantastic film by Todd Field.Tar is a fake biopic. It is the story of Lydia Tar, an orchestra conductor who has won everything, almost like the actress who plays her who has already won two Oscars, but her life is shaken by an accusation of workplace and sexual harassment. The most subtle film about the Me Too of all those that have been made to date. Blanchett, the next Almodóvar girl, composes a character that goes from divisive to pathos in English and German. Interesting that the actress praised the cinema in capital letters when picking up this film.
In the best male performance there has been surprise. Everyone assumed that it would be Brendan Fraser for The Whale, the Darren Aronofski film. One of those roles with prosthetics and a humanistic tone that are popular in the United States and, on top of that, with an actor who returns after various health problems and after having suffered sexual harassment. However, the winner was Colin Farrell for The Banshees of Inisherin, the film by Martin McDonagh, with whom the actor had already worked on Hidden in Bruges and Seven Psychopaths. The story of two lifelong friends who are separated because one of them abruptly decides to end their friendship. A comic and tender role that has moved the jury. McDonagh, an Oscar winner for Three Billboards, has also won best screenplay, for a story of friendship that is a portrait of a rural and Catholic Ireland.
The Fipresci, the critics’ award, has been won by Argentina 1995. An emotional, entertaining and very political judicial drama about the trial that put Videla and the rest of the leaders who organized the Argentine genocide on the bench. Directed by Santiago Miter and starring Ricardo Darín, it is one of those films, perhaps more conventional, but which ends up reaching viewers.
Golden Lion: ‘All The Beauty And The Bloodshed’, de Laura Poitras
Grand Jury Prize: ‘Saint Omer’, by Alice Diop
Silver Lion for Best Director: Luca Guadagnino for ‘Bones and All’
Volpi Cup for Best Actress: Cate Blanchett powder ‘LIBRARY’
Volpi Cup for Best Actor: Colin Farrell for ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Best Screenplay Award: Martin McDonagh for ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Special Jury Prize: ‘No bears’, de Jafar Panahi
Marcello Mastroianni Award to the emerging actor or actriz: Taylor Russell por ‘Bones and All’
Luigi de Laurentiis Award for Best First Film: ‘Saint Omer’, by Alice Diop
Horizons Award for Best Film: ‘World War III’, by Houman Seyedi
Horizons Special Jury Award: Damian Kocur por ‘Bread and salt’
Horizons Award for Best Director: Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel for ‘Vera’
Horizons Award for Best Actress: Vera Gemma for ‘Vera’
Horizons Award for Best Actr: Mohsen Tanabandeh por ‘World War III’
Horizontes Award for Best Screenplay: Fernando Guzzoni by ‘Blanquita’
Horizontes Award for Best Short Film: ‘Snow in September’, the Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir