- Title: ITALY: Stars, taboo, sex and death at Venice film fest
- Date: 27th August 2013
- Summary: VENICE, ITALY (AUGUST 27, 2013) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) JAY WEISSBERG, FILM CRITIC FOR VARIETY SAYING: "Just looking at the stars that are coming you've got George Clooney for the Alfonso Cuaron film and you've got Scarlett Johansson, you've got Nicolas Cage. These are major celebrities. So there's going to be a lot of red carpet news coming out of the festival."
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- Story Text: Space, stars and taboo sex will be on display in Venice this week as the world's oldest international film festival fights to keep its head above water in a city slowly slipping into the sea.
The 70th Venice Film Festival will try and see off competition from increasingly popular extravaganzas in Rome and Toronto by opening with the world premiere of 3D space fantasy "Gravity", starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.
Directed by Mexico's Alfonso Cuaron, of "Children of Men" and Harry Potter-sequel fame, the film depicts Bullock and Clooney as astronauts cast adrift after disaster strikes their shuttle.
"It's a very various and articulated program this year with big Hollywood films like the opening one which is a really strong film" the festival's artistic director Alberto Barbera told Reuters Television on the eve of the festival's opening day.
"On the opposite we have some of the most radical forms of expression of film makers that are beyond the conventional cinema or the classic cinema that we are used to seeing in the first century of the life of the cinema. And in the middle, there is everything." he said.
English-language titles prevail in the lineup of 20 films that will be competing for the Golden Lion award at this year's festival.
American entries include James Franco's adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel "Child of God", David Gordon Green's "Joe" and Peter Landesman's "Parkland", which recounts the days following U.S. President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
In the British camp, Frears' "Philomena" stars Judi Dench as a mother in search of the son she gave up, while Gilliam's "The Zero Theorem" sees Christoph Waltz as a reclusive math genius. Glazer's "Under the Skin" is the first feature from the "Sexy Beast" director since 2004's "Birth".
Amidst competition from film festivals like Telluride and ever-growing showcases taking place in Toronto, London and Rome in a short period of time, Barbera has not had an easy job putting together the festival of his dreams.
The final line-up, Barbera said, was the cream of the crop of the around 3,000 films his team had watched during the selection process.
"The strong films, there is a limited number, so we have to fight to get the films we want", Barbera said. "But I am extremely happy, because I got all the films that I wanted, except on which was the Steve McQueen film '12 years a Slave'. The American producers decided that it was more important to promote the film for the American market than for the rest of the world so they decided to go to Toronto. I think they made a mistake but it's a marketing strategy we cannot compete with."
Considered one of the world's big three film festivals, along with Cannes and Berlin, Venice has struggled to rid itself of a reputation as a high-cost venue for exhibitors.
Jay Weissberg, a critic with Variety magazine told Reuters that Venice is still a force to be reckoned with.
"I think because it's the 70th anniversary there was a certain amount of pressure to put on a really good show. I think that Alberto Barbera, the director, has on paper succeeded in making it into something that people want to come to. He's proven that Venice still needs to be a destination so close against Toronto which keeps on sucking in more and more films, more and more people in the industry who think I don't want to afford, I don't want to pay the extravagant sums for a launch in Venice. Actually, I think now Barbera and the people working for the festival are proving that, well, don't push us away quite yet. We are still relevant, we're still one of the top film festivals," he said.
Stars appearing in films vying for Venice's Golden Lion include include Scarlett Johansson as an alien in "Under the Skin", Zac Efron in "Parkland" and Matt Damon in dystopian fantasy "The Zero Theorem" directed by Terry Gilliam.
Nicolas Cage stars as an ex-convict in the U.S. southern backwoods movie "Joe" while Judi Dench searches for the child she was forced to give up for adoption in "Philomena".
"Just looking at the stars that are coming you've got George Clooney for the Alfonso Cuaron film and you've got Scarlett Johansson, you've got Nicolas Cage. These are major celebrities. So there's going to be a lot of red carpet news coming out of the festival," said Weissberg.
The festival's unlikeliest "star" will be former Iraq-war era U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld in the documentary "The Unknown Known" that takes its title from his famous maxim about threats we know about, and those we don't.
Italy is represented in competition by a documentary, Gianfranco Rosi's "Sacro Gra", about life tucked away along the ring road around Rome, and Gianni Amelio's "L'Intrepido" about an unemployed man who makes a living taking over the jobs of people who have to be absent for one reason or another.
There is much advance interest in Taiwan Chinese director Tsai Ming-Liang's "Jiaoyou" ("Stray Dogs") about a father and his two children who eke out an existence in modern Taipei, and their visitation by a strange woman.
Israeli director Amos Gitai's "Ana Arabia" tells the story of a young woman journalist who visits a small, mixed community of Jews and Arabs living together on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Gitai, a veteran of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war whose helicopter was shot down by a Syrian missile, is widely respected abroad but divides opinion at home because of his exploration of ethnic and religious tensions.
The festival's jury is headed by veteran Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, best known for his steamy 1972 movie "Last Tango in Paris" starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.
The 70th Venice Film Festival runs from August 28 to September 7. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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