67th Venice Film Festival Part 2

By Moira Sullivan 

Stephen Dorff, Sofia Coppola, Ellie Fanning

So much can be said about the Venice Film Festival which ran from 1-11 September. Besides the official competition are several parallel events.

The section Orizzonti, or Horizons presents the best in innovative work with boundary breaking in film.  One film in particular that stands out from the crowd EL SICARIO ROOM 164 by Gianfranco Rosi was filmed inside a hotel room. The subject wears a black mask as he tells the story of being a corrupt policeman in Mexico that worked for a drug cartel. As he tells the story, he draws on a large artist’s pad, sketching the people places and things that he encountered as a man who roughed up and murdered hundreds of people for the crime of owing or stealing money or not fulfilling their duties for the cartel.

The ORIZZONTI AWARD (for SHORT FILMS)

Went to COMING ATTRACTIONS by Peter TSCHERKASSKY (from Austria)

This was a short film of images with a smooth cadence that captures the feel of early cinema, the 1950’s era of advertizing and avantgarde film with references to artists such as Georges Méliès, Jean Cocteau and Ferdinand Léger. The images are arranged as a series of attractions with techniques such as multiple exposures and changes in color.

 A SPECIAL MENTION in this section was given to JEAN GENTIL by Laura Amelia GUZMÁN and Israel CÁRDENAS (a Dominican Republic, Mexico, Germany co production). The film is a candid portrait of a Haitian man who loses his job as an accountant and becomes homeless. His journey takes him to the forest where he lives in a shack and occasionally has a student for language lessons. The candidness of the film reveals the soul of a man who has change forced upon him and it is up to him to survive.

This year at the Venice Film Festival a special retrospective was done on a neglected period of Italian film history Italian comedy entitled–Italian Comedy and the State of Things, with 30 films from the early 1910’s to the end of the 1980’s. One extremely wacky film - Io non spezzo... rompo stars policemen Alighiero Noschese as Viganò and Enrico Montesano as Canepari, directed by Bruno Corbucci. The plot involves catching an Italian American crime boss. What is delightful is Viganò's many children who are trained in law and order including his oldest daughter. The zany adventures of these two comics go through a nostalgic period of the sixties with all the pop culture icons..

The 67th Venice International Film Festival was presided over by jury president Quentin Tarantino and the Golden Lion for best film went to Sofia Coppola for Somewhere.

This year a special lion and SPECIAL MENTION from the jury.

For OVERALL WORK was presented to the US filmmaker Monte HELLMAN whose mentor was B movie producer Roger Corman.  Hellman’s repertoire consists of cult classics such as acid westerns with Jack Nicholson. A film that was featured at the Cannes film festival in 2006, Trapped ashes,  was a special horror film.  Hellman’s film Road to Nowhere, a romantic narrative, was in the official competition of this years festival. The jury referred him as “a great cinema artist and minimalistic poet “.

For Movie Magazine this is Moira Sullivan, Venice.

© 2010 - Moira Sullivan - Air Date:09 /DD/YY
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