The seven-strong Competition line-up for this year’s Venice Critics’ Week includes two debut features from UK writer/directors. Luna Carmoon’s Hoard (sold by Alpha Violet) follows a woman’s life from her loving childhood with her mother through to the grief of her young adulthood. It unites five Screen International UK & Ireland Stars of Tomorrow: Carmoon, producers Loran Dunn and Helen Simmons, lead actor Joseph Quinn and casting director Heather Basten.
Sky Peals (Bankside Films) depicts a lonely man working night shifts at a motorway service station who goes in search of answers on hearing his father has died. Writer/director Moin Hussain was a Screen Star of Tomorrow in 2018.
Italy’s About Last Year, from Dunja Lavecchia, Beatrice Surano and Morena Terranova, is a documentary about three cisgender women in the queer-led dance scene of Turin. Queer athletes take centre stage in German filmmaker Julia Fuhr Mann’s Life Is Not A Competition, But I’m Winning (First Hand Films), as they enter the Athens Olympic Stadium to honour those who were excluded from the winners’ podium.
Winner of the best new performer prize at Taiwan’s 2015 Golden Horse Awards for Thanatos, Drunk, Lee Hong-Chi directs Love Is A Gun (Parallax Films), the story of a small business owner named Sweet Potato whose criminal past catches up with him.
Chilean filmmaker Tana Gilbert’s documentary Malqueridas (Square Eyes) constructs the stories of incarcerated women through images captured by the subjects, using mobile phones banned in prison (the unnamed women are credited as cinematographers). Former Dior and Galliano designer Adrien Beau sizes up genre filmmaking with The Vourdalak (WTFilms), a Super 16-shot tale of the first vampire, inspired by a novella written 40 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Three out of competition titles complete the lineup. The sidebar opens with Andres Peyrot’s God Is A Woman (Pyramide), about a lost film of a community that considers women to be sacred, and closes with Sébastien Vanicek’s Vermin (Charades and WTFilms), about a man whose venomous spider goes missing. Italian documentary Passione Critica, following the evolution of the Union of Italian Film Critics — the organiser of Critics’ Week — will play as a special screening.
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