The selection for the 81st Venice Film Festival (Aug 28-Sept 7) was unveiled today by festival president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and artistic director Alberto Barbera.
Screen International rounds up the key talking points from this year’s line-up, including the return of stars, the lack of streaming titles and a slight improvement in the number of female directors.
Stage is set for the return of A-list stars
This year’s edition more than makes up for 2023’s strike-hit festival. A-list stars including Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Tilda Swinton, Daniel Craig, Joe Alwyn, Jason Schwartzman, Peter Sarsgaard and Caleb Landry Jones are all set to meet the world’s paparazzi outside the Palazzo del Cinema.
They star in some of the most anticipated films of the year including Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie A Deux and Pedro Almodovar’sThe Room Next Door.
The festival will launch with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, starring a constellation all its own in Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Jenna Ortega and Willem Dafoe. With its glamorous vaporetti gliding through picturesque canals, Venice makes an excellent backdrop for promoting a film towards audience awareness and awards. Paparazzi will need to start charging their camera packs now.
Barbera embraces difficult topics
The festival’s lagoon setting, starry red carpets and summer dates don’t lend it a reputation as the most political of festivals. But Venice 81’s line-up collectively mirrors many of the challenges of the times – from the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas conflicts, through to migration, climate catastrophe and the rise of far-right movements.
Many of these themes are explored in documentaries playing out of competition. Asif Kapadia’s 2073 asks what the world will be like in 50 years and shows, according to Barbera, “how the world is rapidly plunging into a vortex of lies, authoritarianism, violence and climate catastrophe – it’s not a happy movie.”
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris returns with Separated, the story of children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
There are two documentaries about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine: Russians At War by exiled Russia director Anastasia Trofimova and Songs Of Slow Burning Earth by Ukrainian filmmaker Olha Zhurba. Petra Costa’s Apocalypse In The Tropics centres on former Brazilian far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.
Far-right themes are also explored in two Competition features. Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s The Quiet Son is the story of the relationship between a father and his eldest son, seduced by far-right ideas. Justin Kurzel’s The Order centres on a US white-supremacist group from the 1980s.
Read more on how Venice has embraced political titles here.
Venice’s love affair with the streamers is on hold
Netflix is traditionally a big supporter of Venice – last year, it launched Maestro and The Killer on the Lido. But this year, the streamer has no titles at the festival. The strike-impacted production hiatus in 2023-24 has left Netflix without its usual batch of heavyweight awards contenders ready for a Venice launch, and the company’s strategy is also evolving under new global film head Dan Lin.
There are only a handful of projects from the other major streamers. Apple TV+ is represented by two out-of-competition titles: Alfonso Cuaron mini-series Disclaimer and feature Wolfs, which will bring George Clooney and Brad Pitt to the red carpet.
Apple acquired rights to the latter thriller directed by Jon Watts back in 2021, with Sony Pictures Releasing handling theatrical distribution. Sony Pictures Classics also has US rights to Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door and Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here.
Amazon Prime Video licensed most international territories from AGC International on The Order, which Vertical Entertainment will distribute in the US.
Warner Bros has the most significant presence of the traditional US players this year, with a pair of starry projects: festival opener Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Joker: Folie a Deux. The company is also handling international distribution on The Room Next Door.
Focus Features has international rights to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, whilst A24 is represented by Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman.
However, the streamers may be on the lookout for acquisition titles this year, with Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, starring Daniel Craig and currently without US distribution, sure to be an in-demand title – albeit clocking in at 151 minutes long.
Cushions at the ready: the films are getting longer
“We are witnessing an expansion of the lengths and conventions of traditional narratives,” wrote Barbera in his introduction to the press notes for today’s selection. He’s not wrong: the line-up includes several lengthy features, including The Brutalist (215 minutes), Youth – Homecoming (152m) and Queer (151m) in Competition; and Phantosmia (245m, moderate by the standards of director Lav Diaz) and Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari (205m) out of competition.
These are all surpassed by the four out-of-competition series, which will play between seven and 10 episodes each, ranging from 343 to 448 minutes of screening time, and include eight episodes of Joe Wright’s M – Son Of The Century at 412 minutes. This will cause scheduling headaches for festival organisers and attendees both industry and public.
“It will be a real effort for the viewers at the festival,” said Barbera. “But we decided to launch this experiment in anticipating the most significant changes that take place in the world of cinema.”
He said the four series are “actually very long films, which have nothing to do with the language and convention of television series” – this sounds of interest to cinephiles, providing they can fit them in their diaries alongside such lengthy features.
“At this festival, our interest lies less in discussing whether [longer films] are a consequence of the stylistic and narrative influence exerted by TV series, which are massively proposed by streamers and equally massively consumed by household audiences, or whether movie producers are trying to counteract the competition by making desperate recourse to the same weapons,” writes Barbera in his notes.
Thankfully, smaller morsels are also on the menu, including new shorts from Marco Bellocchio (Se Posso Permettermi Capitolo II - 20 minutes), Alice Rohrwacher and JR (An Urban Allegory – 21m) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Beauty Is Not A Sin - 7m), while Takeshi Kitano’s out of competition Broken Rage, a surprise inclusion, only just makes it into the feature definition at 62 minutes.
Slight improvement for female directors
Films by seven female directors have been selected for Venice Competition this year, comprising six films in total, making up just 29% of the selection. That number is even bleaker in other strands at just 28% in out of competition, 21% in Horizons and just one female director in Horizons Extra, as a co-director.
In Competition, the seven women make for a slight improvement on the last three editions where films by just five female directors have competed while the number is also up on Cannes’ four female directed-features earlier this year.
The only female director returning to the Lido is Athina Rachel Tsangari, 14 years after playing in Competition with Attenberg. This year, the Greece-born filmmaker premieres neo-western Harvest.
Dutch actor-turned-director Halina Reijn is in Competition for the first time with Babygirl, an English-language erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman, Antonio Banderas and Harris Dickinson.
Coming off the back of a triple win at San Sebastian 2020 for Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April is in Competition, about a doctor accused of performing illegal abortions.
Italian filmmaker Maura Delpero also follows up a festival hit, 2019’s Locarno award-winner Maternal, with Vermiglio, set in an Italian village during the Second World War, while Giulia Louise Steigerwalt’s second feature Diva Futura is about the rise of an erotic film company.
French sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, one of three directing duos playing in Competition, have been selected for The Quiet Son, starring Vincent Lindon as a struggling father.
Meanwhile, there are no Black directors in Competition for the first time in several years; Ava DuVernay made history in 2023 as the first African-American woman to have a film premiere at Venice with Origin, while Alice Diop won the grand jury prize for Saint Omer in 2022.
UK and Irish talent on the Lido
UK and Irish directors, actors, producers and locations are peppered throughout the official selection.
Harvest, produced by Rebecca O’Brien of the UK’s Sixteen Films, alongside New York-based Louverture Films and Germany’s The Match Factory, is in Competition. It was shot in Scotland with a UK cast including Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen and Thalissa Teixeira. BBC Film and Screen Scotland are among the backers.
Another Competition title with UK ties is The Brutalist, which is co-produced by Joshua Horsfield and Saskia Duff’s UK-based Intake Films and backed by US-UK producer-financier Brookstreet, with a cast including Felicity Jones and Joe Alwyn. London-based Protagonist Pictures is handling sales.
UK director Asif Kapadia’s docu-drama 2073 is playing out of competition, with Film4 among its backers. Kapadia is joined by UK filmmaker Kevin Macdonald, with his One To One: John & Yoko, produced through MacDonald’s joint venture with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Productions, Plan B/KM Films, and London-based Mercury Studios.
Read more about UK and Ireland talent in Venice here.
Vibrant Italian contingent
Italian filmmakers are front and centre of the Venice programme. Seven out of the 21 competition films involve Italian partners: five are directed by Italians – Steigerwalt’s Diva Futura, Delpero’s Vermiglio and Guadagnino’s Queer as well as Gianni Amelio’s Battleground, and Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza’s Iddu. Last year, six films in Competition were Italian.
Another two are Italian co-productions: Georgian director Kulumbegashvili’s April and Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain’s Maria.
Out of competition there is a swathe of Italian projects, including Pupi Avati’s The American Backyard, Francesca Comencini’s Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole and Massimo D’anolfi and Martina Parenti’s Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries. Wright’s Mussolini biopic M – Son Of The Century also filmed in Italy and in Italian language. The Horizons strand also has a heavy Italian presence.
The high number of Italian projects is an indicator of the vibrancy of the local production sector, but this year may represent a high point. The Italian government is reforming the country’s tax breaks which spurred a post-pandemic boom in production. But the reforms have taken time, making it challenging for productions to access public funding. The delay has caused many recent Italian and international productions to postpone principal photography or to abandon plans to shoot in Italy altogether.
Singapore makes its debut, as Norway and Egypt return
After 80 editions of the festival, a film from Singapore has finally been selected to play in Competition. Stranger Eyes marks the latest feature by Singapore-based director Yeo Siew Hua, who makes his first appearance on the Lido having previously won Locarno’s Golden Leopard with A Land Imagined in 2018.
The voyeuristic thriller stars Taiwanese actors Lee Kang-sheng and Wu Chien-Ho in the story of a young father who receives footage of his private life after his baby daughter goes missing and tracks down the mysterious voyeur. The Singapore-Taiwan-France-US co-production is also notable as the only title from Asia in the main Competition. Sales are handled by Paris-based Playtime.
Returning to compete at Venice following a 38-year absence is a feature from Norway. Dag Johan Haugerud’s Love represents the first Norwegian film to make the cut since Oddvar Einarson’s X in 1986, which won the special jury prize. Part of a trilogy that was launched with Sex at the Berlinale in February and includes the as-yet-unreleased Dreams, Love follows a woman in her 40s who explores having casual sex instead of a monogamous relationship. “It is extremely explicit, which is quite unusual for us,” said Barbera of the feature, of which M-Appeal handles international sales.
Elsewhere, Khaled Mansour’s Seeking Haven For Mr Rambo is the first feature from Egypt to secure an invite in Venice’s official selection since Ibrahim El Batout’s Winter Of Discontent, which played in Horizons in 2012.
The Egypt-Saudi co-production will play in the Horizons Extra section of the festival and centres on a man in his 30s who tries to find shelter for his beloved dog after he bites a vindictive neighbour. It marks the debut feature of Mansour, with sales handled by Mohamed Hefzy’s Film Clinic.
Final musings…
April, Georgian director Kulumbegashvili’s much-anticipated follow-up to her Golden Shell-winning Beginnings in 2020, is debuting in Competition on the Lido, while Emmanuelle, the next film by France’s Audrey Diwan, who won Venice’s Golden Lion in 2021 for Happening, is opening the San Sebastian film festival in September. Both are being handled by Goodfellas.
Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is the second major festival film of the year following Jacques Audiard’s Cannes Competition title Emilia Perez, to be set entirely in Mexico – and shot entirely out of it. Barbera revealed Guadagnino’s crew recreated a whole neighbourhood of Mexico City in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios; Audiard shot his Mexico-set musical drama entirely on the lot of a studio near Paris.
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