FILM FESTIVAL-VENICE/PREPS Diversity key as Venice film festival gears up for 72nd edition

Record ID: 140621

  • Title: FILM FESTIVAL-VENICE/PREPS Diversity key as Venice film festival gears up for 72nd edition
  • Date: 1st September 2015
  • Summary: VENICE, ITALY (SEPTEMBER 1, 2015) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) VENICE FILM FESTIVAL ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ALBERTO BARBERA SAYING: "And now I think it's getting too much, this kind of competition. I prefer to have a beautiful film that was released already a few days before in its own country instead of just giving up the film because it's not the world premiere. This is the case of the The Clan for example, I think it's a wonderful film, the best film of Pablo Trapero so far, and I desperately wanted to have the film. It was impossible to convince the distribution to change the date of the theatrical release in Argentina so I said why not? I want the film so nobody cares about that." VARIOUS OF COUPLE TAKING SELFIE IN ST. MARK'S SQUARE GONDOLIER VARIOUS OF GONDOLAS IN CANAL
  • Embargoed: 16th September 2015 13:00
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  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVADCATZ2YFORBLO22JJMFMCQTG7
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Final preparations were under way on the Venice Lido on Tuesday (September 1) ahead of the opening day of the 72nd Venice film festival.
    The festival kicks off on Wednesday (September 2) with a gala screening of Baltasar Kormakur's "Everest", starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley and based on the 1996 climbers' disaster on the world's highest mountain.
    In competition are 21 films, including Tom Hooper's "The Danish Girl" starring Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne as one of the first known people to undergo a sex change operation, and performance artist Laurie Anderson's "Heart of a Dog".
    Drake Doremus' "Equals", a romantic science fiction movie starring Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult, also competes as does "Beasts of no Nation", a war drama with Idris Elba.
    Italian director Luca Guadagnino comes to the festival with "A Bigger Splash" starring Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson and Ralph Fiennes, while Charlie Kaufman, writer of the 1999 cult fantasy-comedy "Being John Malkovich", brings stop-motion movie "Anomalisa".
    Also in competition are Chinese director Zhao Liang's "Behemoth", Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's "11 minut", and "Looking for Grace" from Australia's Sue Brooks.
    Speaking to Reuters Television on the eve of the opening day, the festival's artistic director Alberto Barbera said the reaction to this year's line-up which was announced at the end of July had been very positive.
    The decision to offer a very varied selection was probably the reason for the positive feedback, Barbera said.
    "It reflects the diversity of cinema today. We have big names, the return of big names like Sokurov, like Skolimowski, like Bellocchio, like Amos Gitai of course and a lot of new-comers, new talents, together with big Hollywood studios' films. Again, it's a sort of a mix that could meet all the expectations from different types of audiences and media and critics," he said.
    Barbera said he used a simple strategy to choose the films premiering at the Biennale. It was the festival's opening film that posed the biggest challenge, he said.
    "The most difficult thing is to identify the film for the opening night because it's a sort of a special category of films, it has to be spectacular enough, not too violent because the audience of the opening night is different from the rest of the festival, it's made of guests; representatives of the public institutions, authorities, whatever, not cinephiles, not really cinephiles so you have to find a mix of elements that combine the many expectations of the audience," he said.
    Barbera was initially in talks with Sony Pictures to get Robert Zemeckis's "The Walk" as this year's opener - a movie that fit perfectly as the opening film, he said - but the studio decided to open in New York a few days before the film's theatrical release and opted to invest in domestic promotion rather than going for an international strategy, Barbera said.
    Opening films in the last years have included Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)" and "Gravity" by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, who will be heading this year's competition jury.
    The Toronto International Film Festival opens a week after Venice and in past years, competition between the two has been furious.
    The situation was particularly bad last year, Barbera said, with Toronto showing an "aggressive attitude against Telluride and Venice". But the reaction from the people was negative, he said, and this year there had been no problems.
    "I'm doing a festival which is completely different from Toronto. They have 300 feature films, we have no more than 55 feature films so it is a different type of a festival. We do a very limited selection of films. I prefer quality instead of quantity," Barbera said.
    Barbera said that when he first directed the festival 15 years ago, securing a film's world premiere was not a priority. But as the competition between the festivals grew, particularly between Toronto, Telluride and Venice, having world premieres became an arms race to show the strength and power of the festival.
    "And now I think it's getting too much, this kind of competition. I prefer to have a beautiful film that was released already a few days before in its own country instead of just giving up the film because it's not the world premiere. This is the case of the The Clan for example, I think it's a wonderful film, the best film of Pablo Trapero so far, and I desperately wanted to have the film. It was impossible to convince the distribution to change the date of the theatrical release in Argentina so I said why not? I want the film so nobody cares about that," he said.
    Trapero returns to compete at the Venice Film Festival with "El Clan" (The Clan), a drama based on the real-life Puccio family who kidnapped and killed people around Buenos Aires in the 1980s.
    The dark film follows the family as they hold victims captive in their home for ransom money.
    Trapero's first film, "Mundo Grua" (Crane World), took two prizes at the world's oldest film festival in 1999. He also premiered his "Familia Rodante" there in 2004 and sat on the jury in 2012.
    The film premiered in Argentina on August 13 ahead of its Venice outing.
    The 72nd Venice film festival runs Sept. 2-12.
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