Venice Days to open with Blier's The Clink Of The Ice

Nine are world premieres and four are first-time features. Giorgio Gosetti, the section’s delegate announced the line-up in Rome today.

This year, Venice Days opens with Bertrand Blier’s The Clink Of The Ice, an irreverent comedy about illness and death from France via Wild Bunch.

Films to topline the section include The Life Of Fish, directed by Chile’s Matias Bize, which takes place during one night as a young man reflects on his life. Santiago Cabrera (Che) stars. Oscar winner Danis Tanovic presents Cirkus Columbia, a comedy-drama set before the first Balkan war — a co-production from Herzegovina, France, the UK, Slovenia, Germany, Belgium, and Serbia. The US brings The Happy Poet from Paul Gordon about a young person who opens a health food restaurant as a means to fight the economic slowdown.

Two titles hail from Italy: Antonio Capuano’s L’Amore Buio – a Naples-set drama that will be distributed nationally by Fandango. Heaven Without Hearth from Giovanni Davide Maderna and Sara Pozzoli is a film that shifts between the public and private life of a director.

From Belgium-France-Germany comes Noir Ocean directed by Marion Hansel set aboard a 1970s French Navy vessel located off the Polynesian coast; while the Canada-France co production Incendies by Denis Villeneuve centres on a brother and sister who take a journey to their roots to uncover a tragic past.

The four first works in the section are Italy’s Et In Terra Pax co-directed by Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini, described as a Pasolini-esque story of adolescence; a Burkina Faso-France co-production entitled The Place Between by Sarah Bouyain about a young Parisian who returns to Burkina Faso to find her mother. From Colombia, Jairo Carrillo and Oscar Andrade bring Pequenas Voces, a civil war animation inspired by children’s art that was seven years in the making, and finally Turkey’s Majority, an Istanbul-set Romeo and Juliet story by Seren Yuce via the Match Factory.

Venice Days is a non-competitive section however the first works, as all in Venice’s official selection and sidebars, are eligible for Venice’s official Luigi De Laurentiis Lion Of The Future Award, which comes with a $100,000 prize. Additionally, the European Parliament’s Prix Lux will screen three finallists for their prize, which offers subtitled distribution to the winning film in 23 European languages and distributes the films through the European Union. The finalists are Illegal by Olivier Masset-Depasse, Akadimia Platonos by Filippos Tsitos and When We Leave by Feo Aladag..

The Venice Festival runs from September 1-11.