Venice Review: Makbul Mubarak’s ‘Autobiography’

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Berlin-based sales outfit M-Appeal has closed distribution deals for Italy and Greece following the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The Israeli-Ukrainian co-production plays in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, and will have its North American premiere on Sept. 14 at Toronto Film Festival in the Contemporary World Cinema section. Rome-based P.F.A Films Srl will distribute the film in Italy, with a theatrical release planned for April 2023. The company’s recent titles include “Fabian – Going to the Dogs” by Dominik Graf, “The Audition” by Ina Weisse, and “Border” by Abbasi Ali.

The Don’t Worry Darling cast was serving the drama at the Venice Film Festival!!

Ahead of accepting the Venice Film Festival’s Glory to the Filmmaker Award this evening, legendary filmmaker Walter Hill met with the press corps here on the Lido to talk about his new western, Dead For A Dollar.

EXCLUSIVE: Fresh off strong notices for Darren Aronofsky’s Venice Film Festival drama The Whale, Stranger Things star Sadie Sink has been tapped to star with Eric Bana (Munich) and Sylvia Hoeks (Blade Runner 2049) in thriller Berlin Nobody, which got underway in the German capital today.

The phrase “Joanna Hogg’s Shutter Island” is not a line that many critics expect to bust out in their lifetimes, but with her sixth feature the British director has made a fascinating foray into genre cinema that, while firmly in keeping with the rest of her quasi-autobiographical works, makes a surprising departure from the upper-middle-class realism of her signature film The Souvenir.

Kelly Ripa is now back in New York City having waved goodbye to her family's idyllic summer getaway.MORE: Kelly Ripa wows in sporty bikini in holiday photo alongside Mark ConsuelosThe Live star and her husband Mark Consuelos were joined by their three grown-up children, Michael, Lola and Joaquin, on the vacation - and they all shared some stunning photos from their time away.Michael even revealed on Instagram in a rare post that they were joined by a famous friend during their time abroad too.VIDEO: Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos' love story The family are incredibly close to Albert Bianchini, former producer of Live With Regis and Kelly and the executive producer for Kelly and Mark's production company Milojo Productions.MORE: Kelly Ripa's family change involving youngest son Joaquin revealedMORE: Kelly Ripa's son Joaquin's big milestone revealedMichael posted a photo of himself posing by the pool on Instagram, tagging Albert as the photographer. "Made in Heaven," he simply captioned the post.

EXCLUSIVE: Nancy Buirski, director of feature doc Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, has signed a development deal with Cineflix Productions.

Tilda Swinton is switching up her look.

Jessica Kiang A mysterious nighttime mist swirls through Joanna Hogg’s sorrowful, secluded “The Eternal Daughter.” It is pumped, in artificial, Hammer-horror puffs and plumes, across groves and gravel driveways. It snakes around gables topped with gargoyles, snags on hedges, rubs against dark, staring, possibly haunted windows. It shrouds the film the way the unspoken words, undefined guilt and unfulfilled duties that exist between maybe every mother and daughter can cloud the truth of their fraught, primal connection. And it is this grave film’s most apposite motif, in being beautiful and mood-making but vaporous: try to grasp it and your hand closes on nothing but a faint, damp chill.  Filmmaker Julie (Tilda Swinton), her aging mother Rosalind (Tilda Swinton) and Rosalind’s dog Louis (Tilda Swinton’s dog Louis) arrive in a white cab one foggy night at the remote Welsh hotel that Julie has booked for a stay over Rosalind’s December birthday. One of the secrets guarded by the mansion’s imposingly eerie Gothic facade is that it was not always a hotel. It used to belong to Rosalind’s aunt Jocelyn, and as a child during the war, Rosalind stayed here. So there’s a sentimentality to Julie’s choice of the place, as well as a very slightly sneaky agenda, signalled each time she furtively hits record on her phone as Rosalind begins to reminisce: Julie is gleaning material for an upcoming project about her and her mother, though she’s finding it difficult to get started. 

There’s always been a haunted mood in Joanna Hogg’s films, felt both in the deceptively mundane domestic rhythms of the likes of “Exhibition” and “Archipelago,” and in the exquisite memory pieces, “The Souvenir” and “The Souvenir Part II.” Like the best and most personal of storytellers—Chantal Akerman comes to mind as a creator with akin sensibilities—Hogg is a filmmaker possessed by the slivers of her recollections.

Zack Sharf When it comes to buzz emerging out of the 2022 Venice Film Festival, few actors dominated headlines as positively as Brendan Fraser. The actor is earning Oscar buzz and the best reviews of his career for his leading turn in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale.” The Venice audience at the film’s world premiere gave the movie a huge six-minute standing ovation. Fraser broke down in tears during the reception, a video of which shared by Variety co-editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh on Twitter has earned over 15.5 million views and counting. Dwayne Johnson, who co-starred with Fraser in 2001’s “The Mummy Returns,” celebrated “The Whale” standing ovation on social media and championed Fraser’s acting comeback.

Jennie Punter “The Maiden,” Graham Foy’s finely tuned story of adolescent mythmaking, togetherness and grief, has its world premiere Tuesday in Venice Days before heading to Toronto, but the film’s impressive international journey actually began in Cannes two years ago. Based in Toronto since 2008, Foy grew up in suburban Calgary where “Maiden” is set, spent teenage summers near the graffiti-covered railroad bridge and ragged ravine, where much of the film was shot, and, like one of the characters, was an avid skateboarder. He had been tapping away at the “Maiden” script — which draws from his experiences but is not autobiographical — for several years when his short “August 22, This Year” was selected for the 2020 Cannes’ Critics’ Week.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Paris-based sales agency and production company Luxbox has snagged the rights to “Trenque Lauquen,” the fourth feature by Argentine director-producer Laura Citarella, ahead of its Sept. 8 world premiere in the Venice Horizons sidebar. The pick-up continues Luxbox’s strong line in Latin American titles, seen this year in Sundance entry “Dos Estaciones” and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title “1976.” Filmed in two parts, “Trenque Lauquen” begins with a couple of men, Rafael and Ezequiel, who are on the road, both searching for a woman, Laura, who has vanished. 

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.

spit on his co-star at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. The incident occurred right before the world premiere of their film “Don’t Worry Darling,” further fueling the drama already surrounding the star Florence Pugh and Styles’ director-lover Olivia Wilde.According to the video — which was captured from several different angles — Styles subtly hocked a loogie in Pine’s lap as he was taking his seat next to the “Star Trek” actor.

The Venice Film Festival audience were enraptured with “The Banshees of Inisherin”.

Naman Ramachandran The subject of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of the topics of discussion at the Venice Film Festival, bubbled to the surface again on Tuesday with Tilda Swinton making a statement with her hair dyed yellow. “It’s my honor to wear half of the Ukrainian flag,” Swinton said at the press conference for Joanna Hogg’s “The Eternal Daughter,” when complimented on her look by a journalist. Swinton expressed that it was an honor later during the conference as well. The star wore a light blue top, which complements the dark blue of the Ukraine flag. Shot during lockdown, “The Eternal Daughter” follows an artist and her elderly mother who confront long-buried secrets when they return to a former family home, now a hotel haunted by its mysterious past. Swinton plays both mother and daughter. The names of the mother and daughter in the film are Rosalind and Julie, the names for Swinton and her real life daughter Honor Swinton Byrne in Hogg’s “The Souvenir” and “The Souvenir Part II.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Francesco Zippel’s Sergio Leone doc, which premieres on Tuesday at the Venice Film Festival, is the first portrait of the Italian master made with full support of his children Raffaella and Andrea. Titled “Sergio Leone: The Man Who Invented America,” the high-profile doc is premiering in the Venice Classics section for docs on cinema. It features an impressive list of voices holding forth on what makes Leone special for them. Among these are: Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Giuseppe Tornatore, Frank Miller, Darren Aronofsky, Damien Chazelle and Robert De Niro (see clip). But aside from Leone’s visionary talent as a director what emerges is that as his career escalated from the so-called “Dollars Trilogy” to “Once Upon a Time in the West” through to his final masterpiece, “Once Upon a Time in America,” Leone’s life was steeped in two inextricably linked passions: film and family. 

Five years on from their thrilling diplomatic drama “The Summit,” icons of Argentinian cinema Santiago Mitre (“White Elephant,” “Paulina,” ) and Ricardo Darín (“Wild Tales,” “The Secret in Their Eyes”) have teamed up once more for the Venice-bound “Argentina, 1985.” This time, however, their collaboration is much more fact than fiction, as the film seeks to bring one of Argentina’s most historic judicial trials to the big screen.