Venice 2022: Last News

How can happiness flourish amid domestic chaos and cultural intolerance? Emanuele Crialese’s film “L’immensità” explores a transgender youth’s journey toward acceptance. And now the movie hits US theaters after its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year.

Steve Buscemi hasn’t directed a film in a while: since 2007, with “Interview,” which he co-starred in with Sienna Miller. But now the “actor’s actor” is again behind the camera for his latest film.

Italian filmmaker Andrea Pallaoro has good luck at the Venice Film Festival. His feature debut, “Medeas,” won the Best Innovative Budget Award at the Lido in 2013.

Was it a shock when Laura Poitras‘ new documentary “All The Beauty And The Bloodshed,” about Nan Goldin and the fall of the Sackler family, won the Golden Lion at Venice in September? Only in that it’s the second documentary ever to win Venice’s top prize. After all, Poitras’s credentials speak for themselves.

“Bardo (False Chronicle Of A Handful Of Truths)” hit the Lido at the Venice Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival earlier this month, Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s first movie since “The Revenant.” But those screenings are now a test-run for Iñárritu’s latest.

Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp’s documentary “Bobi Wine: Ghetto President” is a feat of cinematic journalism that captures a tumultuous timeline of events while keeping the focus on its titular subject. Going by the stage name Bobi Wine, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu is a wildly popular singer in Uganda who is voted into office and becomes a major figure in the political party that opposes its president, General Yoweri Museveni.

With Italy not being a nation typically associated with progressive views and attitudes regarding sexuality, it was reassuring to hear the largely local crowd at the “Lord of the Ants” press screening of the Venice Film Festival laugh at the preposterous words of an ultra-religious woman on screen talking about how she “cured” her son from homosexuality by sending him to a saint. Whether the scene was intended to provoke that reaction is another story.

One of the first post-WWII trials to hold Germans to account, the January 1946 Kiev trial took place in the USSR and has since become known as the Kiev Nuremberg. Overlapping in both time and scope with that infamous trial, the tribunal took place over the course of two days where 15 Germans stood trial for war crimes, ultimately being convicted and hanged for atrocities committed.  Utilizing three hours of courtroom footage that he found in an archive while constructing his 2021 documentary “Babi Yar.

While she may not be a household name compared to the directors that she has worked for, Bonnie Timmermann’s IMDb reads as a decade-spanning watch list of some of the best films ever made.

Heavy on Loachian social realism and undergirded by the intensity and heavy stakes of a Safdie Brothers flick, Juan Diego Botto’s gritty eviction thriller “On the Fringe” — produced by Penélope Cruz, who also lends her name to the billing sheet — makes for hard-hitting stuff. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival today in the Orrizonti section, here’s a slice of agitprop that feels as timely as ever, with the energy crisis surging across Europe, the costs of living rocketing from shore to shore, and society’s most marginalized left to pick up the tab.  Anyone with half a heart and half a brain will be quickly won over by its interweaving stories, following three different people in the same Spanish city living under the cold, foreboding shadow of red-stamp eviction notices: though a little baggy in the second act, the first and final thirty-minutes are appropriately earnest and affecting.

With its abundance of flickery grain, exceedingly credible period production, and eminently authentic ensemble, UK filmmaker Georgia Oakley’s astonishing debut feature “Blue Jean” — which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week, no doubt primed to pick up a swath of gongs and laurels — could well be a relic exhumed from the back cupboards of a dusty film archive.  READ MORE: Venice Film Festival Preview: 16 Must-See Films To Watch Set amid Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror in the late ‘80s, the little-known Rosy McEwen puts in a calling card performance for the ages as Jean, a closeted lesbian gym teacher torn asunder by the emergence of Section 28: barbaric British legislation that, until 2003, prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” across the country.

One doesn’t need to be religious to feel the impact of the words uttered by Pope Francis to never-ending crowds of faithful followers, a concept deeply understood by Gianfranco Rossi with “In Viaggio,” a decade-long chronicling of the travels of the head of the Catholic church across all corners of the world. Composed entirely of archival footage, the film grants rare access to the public life of the pontifical, not only from the elevated security of a pulpit but from the more democratic grounds of unpaved streets and vast public avenues.   The film opens with the following disclaimer: “In the first nine years of his pontificate, Pope Francis made 37 trips visiting 53 countries, focusing on his most important issues: poverty, migration, the environment, solidarity and war.” These very same issues guide the work of Rossi, whose two latest documentaries – 2016’s Golden Bear-winning “Fire at Sea” and 2020’s “Notturno” – deal with the haunting ripples of the refugee crisis and the war in the Middle East (in fact, Rossi and Pope Francis came together after the pontiff visited the island of Lampedusa following a watch of “Fire at Sea”).

[VENICE] It’s Saturday afternoon at the Tennis Club on the Lido, and American director Abel Ferrara chats on camera to an Italian television host before some of his customary swearing sets in, courtesy of a few brave souls wanting a photo with him next to the courts. He’s hungry.

Over the weekend, we saw a number of high-profile films get major premieres at the Venice Film Festival. One of the most anticipated features to debut is Alejandro G.

What a knotty task, to detach instinctive overtures of motherly love from the traditional structures that perpetuate the restraining of gender roles, offering love freely without conforming.

As a fresh batch of boot camp recruits moves through processing, a name keeps resurfacing like some kind of curse — as if its mere mention is enough to call down the power of its wrath.  “Classic case for Eismayer,” one experienced soldier remarks about a smart-mouthed inductee, while another explains his fake-illness strategy thusly: “Just trying to avoid drillmaster Eismayer.” A legend in the Austrian armed forces, Sergeant Major Charles Eismayer (Gerhard Liebmann) is equal parts bad-ass and martinet, yet what he is, more than anything else, is afraid, and it’s the exploration of this fear that serves as the backbone of “Eismayer.” A title card at the beginning of the film sets up the story as based on actual events — something that the brutalist architecture, bland color palette, and utilitarian nature of the military base setting reinforces right from the jump.

Lars von Trier returned to the Venice Film Festival on Thursday with the third and final season of his “The Kingdom” series, “The Kingdom Exodus.” And the show’s premiere was an overwhelming success, with the crowd reportedly cheering every time von Trier’s name was mentioned or came on screen. But von Trier also brought some sad news to the Lido this year: his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis, which the director found out four months ago.

For a certain type of cinephile versed in the avant-garde, the name Jonas Mekas brings to mind a particular type of autobiographical filmmaking — one that prioritized the immediacy of a given moment over context or sometimes even narrative coherence. He was an Immensely prolific filmmaker, critic, archivist, and poet who, in his own words, immigrated to the US in the late ’40s “hungry, thirsty for art,” taking in everything he could.  While not exactly forgotten, Mekas’ work as the “Film Culture” founder, Village Voice critic, historian, and champion of such directors as Kenneth Anger and Ken Jacobs, has often overshadowed his prolific film work.

As a child growing up in the United States, you’re taught that betraying the country is a terrible act, punishable by death. Every morning, in most public schools, you’re forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which overtly puts your patriotism at the forefront of the day’s events.

A woman prays in the woods. A bright bubblegum pink wig frames her closed eyes as she wishes for good clients, rustling leaves turned choir, sprawling branches turned pew.

Abel Ferrara has had several premieres of his films at the Venice Film Festival over the years. Now, Variety reports that Ferrara is back again this year with “Padre Pio,” one of the highlights of the Venice Days lineup announced today.