At the historic Biennale archive, among the endless rows of bookshelves and historical artifacts, festival chief Alberto Barbera announced this year’s Venice Film Festival lineup via livestream. Over the span of an hour, Barbera carefully provided commentary for his curation. One by one, he announced the selected titles, with a handful of notable inclusions. “The movies we have selected are like our children,” jokes Barbera. “So I’ll talk about them for hours.”
Two years after Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed won the Golden Lion, a new documentary returns to the competition for a chance at glory. Cinéma vérité practitioner Wang Bing was selected to compete with his third and final film in his acclaimed Youth trilogy. With this latest installment, Youth (Homecoming) examines the fallout of the bankrupt textile factory. The final chapter showcases the resilience of the young workers amid mass layoffs as they are forced to return home. The second chapter, Youth (Hard Times), will premiere before Venice at the Locarno film festival, where it will compete for the Golden Leopard. The first film, Youth (Spring), screened at Cannes and TIFF last year.
Two unique non-fiction works were selected to compete in the Orizzonti section. Alex Ross Perry’s anticipated hybrid film Pavements follows the titular Californian underground band. The hybrid-form evolves into a fictional love-story with a jukebox musical twist. The film features an all-star cast which includes Joe Kerry, Jason Schwartzman, Nat Wolff, Tim Heidecker, and Zoe Lister-Jones. After directing Stray (2020), Elizabeth Lo returns to the director’s chair with her latest non-fiction work, Mistress Dispeller. The film follows Wang Zhenxi, a Chinese woman who is hired to maintain the bounds of marriage and break up affairs upon the request of her clientele. The humanistic premise explores Wang’s relationship with her lovelorn occupation while also spotlighting the cultural norms which shape romantic partnerships in contemporary China.
The out of competition section featured some big names. Errol Morris returns to Venice after his polarizing Steve Bannon doc American Dharma. This time around, the world-famous documentarian turns his camera onto the border crisis between the United States and Mexico. With his latest feature Separated, Morris examines the separation of children from illegal immigrant parents. The policy was infamously imposed by the Trump administration. Asif Kapadia will also make a big splash with his hotly anticipated sci-fi documentary 2073. Taking inspiration from Chris Marker, Kapadia looks fifty-years into the future. His latest film merges science-fiction with documentary to produce a one-of-a-kind portrait on the catastrophic state of the world. And on the Canadian front, the French-Canadian co-production Russians at War, directed by Anastasia Trofimova and produced by Trofimova with Sally Blake, Philippe Lavasseur, and recent To Kill a Tiger Oscar nominee Cornelia Principe.
In the Venice classics section, Barberra announced a handful of documentaries about cinema that will premiere as special events. Leo Favier’s Miyazaki, L’Espirit de la nature follows the acclaimed animation legend with context regarding the release of his Academy Award winning feature The Boy and the Heron. Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest essay film Chain Reactions commemorates the 50th anniversary of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler’s From Darkness to Light unveils missing footage from one of the most infamous lost films of all time. The documentary will include scenes from Jerry Lewis’ controversial holocaust dramedy The Day the Clown Cried.
Other notable documentary features include Petra Costa’s timely Bolsonaro document Apocalypse in the Tropics, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ enchanting music profile One to One: John & Yoko, Goran Hugo Olsson’s archival epic Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989, and Andres Veiel’s historical neo-nazi portrait Riefenstahl.
Separate from the main slate, Michael Premo’s Trump insurrection doc Homegrown will compete as part of the Venice Critics Week. The film follows three right-wing activists in the summer of 2020, as they support Donald Trump’s campaign for presidency. When they become convinced that the election was rigged, the men take their fight to the streets. Especially with the upcoming US elections arriving in a few weeks, Premo’s controversial subject matter will surely be the talk of the Lido.
On the other side of the fiction coin, Venice will premiere Luca Guadanigno’s ambitious William S. Burroughs adaptation Queer, Pedro Almodóvar’s hotly-anticipated English language debut The Room Next Door, Todd Phillips’ jukebox comic-book sequel Joker: Folie à Deux, Pablo Larraín’s elegant Maria Callas biopic Maria, and Brady Corbet’s architecture epic The Brutalist.
