65th Venice International Film Festival - About The Films in The Festival

About The Films in The Festival

Of the 52 films selected to screen at this year's Venice Mostra, only 21 will be competing for the Golden Lion top prize.

Most of the films at Venice will be world premieres, including the "things that go boom" psychological thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker. The film deals with the physical and emotional strains faced by EOD bomb squads in Iraq. Also premiering at the festival is home-grown favorite Birdwatcher directed by Italy's own Marco Bechis. Other strong contenders for the coveted Golden Lion award are the Darren Aronofsky directed film, The Wrestler, and director Barbet Schroeder's entry, L'Inju: la Bete dans l'Ombre.

With no British pictures and a diminished U.S. presence, the Venice Film Festival will focus on Italian and Japanese cinema with four films from each country, including Oscar-winning animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki's latest, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.

European films are also set to dominate the festival, due in part to the American Writer's Guild strike and the effects of the slow down in the film pipeline. Other theories for the lack of American films are the U.S. economy (with dollar's slump vs. the euro), and Hollywood studio belt-tightening. The major U.S. studios have effectively gobbled up all the small independent labels, then went on to make poor development and/or marketing decisions causing the inevitable shuttering or downsizing of these same "independent" labels. Former "indies" such as Warner Independent, New Line and Paramount Vantage are ghosts of the past. The lucrative temptation for studios to bust their budgets with big tent pole films has also meant the hard squeeze on less expensive, but the more challenging-to-market independent films. Risk-averse U.S. majors are seemingly no longer as willing to foot the bill for innovative films made for grownups. Industry trade magazines have pronounced this both as a death and/or a subsequent potential rebirth or "reboot" for independent filmmaking.

"We look for the vitality of cinema where it is hidden, be it in popular works or auteur cinema; it makes no difference to us", festival director Marco Mueller says. Muller added, "The choices I made this year reconfirm an identity for the festival, but I definitely want Venice to stay pluralistic and contradictory." The show this year is packed with Japanese and French titles, and Mueller was compelled to honor domestic films, unfurling the largest Italian contingent on the Lido in ages.

African cinema is also well repped with Ethiopian director Haile Gerima's Teza and Algerian helmer Tariq Teguia is screening Inland.

Asia could win the Golden Lion for best film for the fourth year running. Leading the Japanese line-up is Akires to kame (Achilles and the Tortoise) directed by Takeshi Kitano. Kitano is a favored son in Venice, having already won the 1997 Leone d'Oro for Hana-bi (Fireworks) and who was awarded a special prize for his direction of Zatoichi in 2003.

Films being screen out of competition include 35 Rums by French director Claire Denis, Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami's film, Shirin and an autobiographical documentary by Belgium-born director Agnès Varda.

The "record" for the longest film at this festival (or maybe any) goes to Philippine director Lav Diaz's Melancholia, with a running time of some seven-and-a-half hours, and which is included in the Orizzonti (Horizons) section.

A highlight of this year's Italian retrospective is a restored version of Federico Fellini's 1952 comedy The White Sheik with forty minutes of newly discovered footage.