News Analysis India

Tag: Venice International Film Festival

  • Sofia Coppola’s ‘Priscilla’ release postponed

    By Express News Service

    Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, the upcoming biopic of actor and businesswoman Priscilla Presley, scheduled to release on October 27, has been postponed. The film will now hit the theatres on November 3. Priscilla premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival and received a 7-minute standing ovation.

    The film will throw light on Priscilla who was married to iconic singer/performer Elvis Presley. While Cailee Spaeny will star as Priscilla Presley, Jacob Elordi plays Elvis on the screen. The biopic has a script, which Sofia Coppola adapted from Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me.

    The film stars Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley, while Jacob Elordi plays Elvis on the screen. The memoir talks about her relationship with the superstar singer, spanning her marriage, the birth of their daughter, the fights they had, and the eventual divorce until Elvis’ death.

    Distributed by A24, the film is produced by Sofia Coppola, Lorenzo Mieli, and Youree Henley. 

    Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, the upcoming biopic of actor and businesswoman Priscilla Presley, scheduled to release on October 27, has been postponed. The film will now hit the theatres on November 3. Priscilla premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival and received a 7-minute standing ovation.

    The film will throw light on Priscilla who was married to iconic singer/performer Elvis Presley. While Cailee Spaeny will star as Priscilla Presley, Jacob Elordi plays Elvis on the screen. The biopic has a script, which Sofia Coppola adapted from Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me.

    The film stars Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley, while Jacob Elordi plays Elvis on the screen. The memoir talks about her relationship with the superstar singer, spanning her marriage, the birth of their daughter, the fights they had, and the eventual divorce until Elvis’ death.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    Distributed by A24, the film is produced by Sofia Coppola, Lorenzo Mieli, and Youree Henley. 

  • Saint Omer: Mothers and daughters in a chamber

    Express News Service

    Two of the best films of 2022 premiered at Venice International Film Festival, followed by showings at Toronto International Film Festival. One is Alice Diop’s first narrative feature Saint-Omer which came after several revered documentaries by the filmmaker, and the other is Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter. The former also won the Silver Lion at Venice.

    These two distinctive films share special similarities in the way they use dialogue and sound in addition to the centrality of the relationship they inquire. Both are about mothers and daughters but differ widely in the treatment and the tension in the underlying dynamics between characters. In the former, it is quiet. In the latter, it is spoken.

    Saint Omer is about a French-Senegalese novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame), who is working on a new book. She is in a relationship with a white French man, and we learn that she suffers intergenerational trauma sparked by her own troubled relationship with her mother. She is a willing audience to the trial of a Senegalese immigrant in France, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), an accused of leaving her 15-month-old infant on the beach, the tide acceding to Coly’s idea of killing her daughter. Rama’s new book is based on this trial. But for Rama, the trial is hardly unsentimental. Her roots, her history with her family and her status as an immigrant’s child in France makes her look at Coly in a unique light—compared to the public or the law’s perception—which also gives rise to a form of second-hand guilt. It calls to the question of whose story Rama is working to tell and how their lives conflate and mingle with one another in all their traumatic disarray.

    Saint Omer is a chamber drama that’s mostly set in the courthouse with long monologues from lawyers and Coly punctuated by scenes of silence that gaze at Rama in a quizzing, eerie fashion. We catch her looking out of the window during her most vulnerable instances, and creepy choir music accompanies these moments of quiet introspection (there is also Nina Simone at one point). 

    The Eternal Daughter too is a chamber drama set in a creepy hotel in the wintery British countryside, the building once a mansion of some aristocracy. Julie (Tilda Swinton), a filmmaker, arrives with her mother Rosalind (also Swinton) for a few weeks stay, and Hogg builds the cold atmosphere of a mother and daughter enclosed in a warm bond at odds with the colder blanket surrounding them. None apart from a rude receptionist (who doubles up as the waitress) seems to be present. We also don’t see the two Swintons—mother and daughter—in the same frame except for a lone throwaway shot. All this is to say that Hogg’s film is less about misdirection and more about a confrontation that has led to the personification of grief.Saint Omer, also about mothers and daughters, is a film about the fear of confrontation—of truth, relationship, life in a foreign land, and the complex equations of motherhood. 

    Diop and Hogg thrive in the atmosphere they build—the claustrophobia of a courthouse, the close-ups accompanied by lengthy dialogues that create it and the isolation shared by Rama and Coly. And in the case of The Eternal Daughter, the weather around the hotel, the darkly lit alleyways, the twin bed hotel room and bizarre sounds and appearances. They strangely form companion pieces based on the same relationship but with origins in a different race, different social classes and sharing completely different bonds.

    Two of the best films of 2022 premiered at Venice International Film Festival, followed by showings at Toronto International Film Festival. One is Alice Diop’s first narrative feature Saint-Omer which came after several revered documentaries by the filmmaker, and the other is Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter. The former also won the Silver Lion at Venice.

    These two distinctive films share special similarities in the way they use dialogue and sound in addition to the centrality of the relationship they inquire. Both are about mothers and daughters but differ widely in the treatment and the tension in the underlying dynamics between characters. In the former, it is quiet. In the latter, it is spoken.

    Saint Omer is about a French-Senegalese novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame), who is working on a new book. She is in a relationship with a white French man, and we learn that she suffers intergenerational trauma sparked by her own troubled relationship with her mother. She is a willing audience to the trial of a Senegalese immigrant in France, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), an accused of leaving her 15-month-old infant on the beach, the tide acceding to Coly’s idea of killing her daughter. Rama’s new book is based on this trial. But for Rama, the trial is hardly unsentimental. Her roots, her history with her family and her status as an immigrant’s child in France makes her look at Coly in a unique light—compared to the public or the law’s perception—which also gives rise to a form of second-hand guilt. It calls to the question of whose story Rama is working to tell and how their lives conflate and mingle with one another in all their traumatic disarray.

    Saint Omer is a chamber drama that’s mostly set in the courthouse with long monologues from lawyers and Coly punctuated by scenes of silence that gaze at Rama in a quizzing, eerie fashion. We catch her looking out of the window during her most vulnerable instances, and creepy choir music accompanies these moments of quiet introspection (there is also Nina Simone at one point). 

    The Eternal Daughter too is a chamber drama set in a creepy hotel in the wintery British countryside, the building once a mansion of some aristocracy. Julie (Tilda Swinton), a filmmaker, arrives with her mother Rosalind (also Swinton) for a few weeks stay, and Hogg builds the cold atmosphere of a mother and daughter enclosed in a warm bond at odds with the colder blanket surrounding them. None apart from a rude receptionist (who doubles up as the waitress) seems to be present. We also don’t see the two Swintons—mother and daughter—in the same frame except for a lone throwaway shot. All this is to say that Hogg’s film is less about misdirection and more about a confrontation that has led to the personification of grief.
    Saint Omer, also about mothers and daughters, is a film about the fear of confrontation—of truth, relationship, life in a foreign land, and the complex equations of motherhood. 

    Diop and Hogg thrive in the atmosphere they build—the claustrophobia of a courthouse, the close-ups accompanied by lengthy dialogues that create it and the isolation shared by Rama and Coly. And in the case of The Eternal Daughter, the weather around the hotel, the darkly lit alleyways, the twin bed hotel room and bizarre sounds and appearances. They strangely form companion pieces based on the same relationship but with origins in a different race, different social classes and sharing completely different bonds.

  • Marilyn Monroe film ‘Blonde’ arrives in Venice

    By Associated Press

    VENICE, Italy: The 79th edition of the Venice International Film Festival is starting to wind down, but they’ve saved one of the most anticipated films of the slate for last. “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe film starring Ana de Armas, is having its world premiere Thursday night in competition.

    The nearly three-hour epic is based on a work of biographical fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and examines the public and private life of the Hollywood icon from her troubled childhood as Norma Jeane to her global stardom as Marilyn Monroe. De Armas, who was born in Cuba, worked with a dialect coach for a year to prepare.

    “Blonde” also stars Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, and Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio. The Netflix film, produced by Brad Pitt’s company Plan B, is the first movie ever made by the streamer to be rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association, meaning no one under the age of 17 is allowed to see the film in a theater.

    The film will be playing in select theaters starting Sept. 16 before becoming available on Netflix on Sept. 23. It’s one of many Oscar hopefuls launching in Venice, where it is also among the films up for the festival’s awards on Sept. 10.

    VENICE, Italy: The 79th edition of the Venice International Film Festival is starting to wind down, but they’ve saved one of the most anticipated films of the slate for last. “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe film starring Ana de Armas, is having its world premiere Thursday night in competition.

    The nearly three-hour epic is based on a work of biographical fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and examines the public and private life of the Hollywood icon from her troubled childhood as Norma Jeane to her global stardom as Marilyn Monroe. De Armas, who was born in Cuba, worked with a dialect coach for a year to prepare.

    “Blonde” also stars Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, and Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio. The Netflix film, produced by Brad Pitt’s company Plan B, is the first movie ever made by the streamer to be rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association, meaning no one under the age of 17 is allowed to see the film in a theater.

    The film will be playing in select theaters starting Sept. 16 before becoming available on Netflix on Sept. 23. It’s one of many Oscar hopefuls launching in Venice, where it is also among the films up for the festival’s awards on Sept. 10.

  • No stranger to plagues, Venice opens film festival with caution

    By Associated Press

    VENICE: Visitors to Venice could be forgiven for not realizing that beyond the majesty of St. Mark’s Square and the romance of gondola rides lies a city that centuries ago helped provide a baseline of what the world knows today about containing pandemics.It was here that the term “quarantine” was coined, after merchant ships arriving in the 15th-century Venetian Republic were moored for 40 days (“quaranta giorni” in Italian) to see if their crews were afflicted with the plague. It was here that the first isolated pestilence hospital was built on a solitary island in the lagoon, a precursor to today’s COVID-19 isolation wards. And it was in Venice that 16th-century doctors donned beak-nosed masks filled with aromatic herbs to cleanse the air they breathed when treating the sick — an attempt at self-protection that today is the favored choice for Venetian Carnival costumes. Venice’s central place in the history of battling pandemics provides a relevant backdrop to this year’s Venice Film Festival, which opens Wednesday with the premiere of Pedro Almodovar’s in-competition film “Parallel Mothers.” Almodovar developed the project during Spain’s 2020 coronavirus lockdown, one of the harshest in the West. 

    ALSO READ: Pedro Almodovar’s Madres Paralelas to premiere at Venice Film FestivalIn a pre-opening screening Tuesday, Italian director Andre Segre presents a short documentary shot last year showing how Venice organizers coped with COVID-19 to stage the first and only in-person international film festival during the first year of the outbreak. The scenes in Segre’s film — shocking then, normal now — feature half-full theaters for Hollywood premieres, masked movie stars, cleaners in hazmat suits and the “blink, blink, blink” of remote thermometers taking temperatures at festival checkpoints. Festival director Alberto Barbera said Tuesday he hopes the festival’s 2021 edition will mark the “reopening that was not the case last year.” But unlike the film festival in Cannes, which came back to life this year in France after skipping 2020, Venice still has to comply with stringent Italian anti-COVID restrictions.A huge barricade once again is sealing off public access to the red carpet and there are limited chances for fans to catch VIP water taxi arrivals on the Lido. More than 10 testing stations have been set up, and festival-goers must show proof of a negative test, vaccination or having recently recovered from COVID-19 to enter screenings. Masks are required indoors.In other words, the Venice show is going on — other premieres at the world’s oldest film festival include the debut of Denis Villeneuve “Dune” and Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in “Spencer” — even as Italy copes with new infections driven by the highly contagious delta variant.For Venice, though, it’s really nothing new.”The history of Venice is a history that teaches us how our city, first among European capitals, understood ahead of time how to manage viruses,” said Simone Venturini, Venice’s tourism chief. “These recurrences are studied and recalled even more today because the Venetian model is a model that paradoxically is still used.”Beginning with the first confirmed plague to strike Venice — the 1348 outbreak that killed at least a third of its population — the city put in place containment measures even without understanding epidemiologically how it spread, said Fabio Zampieri, a history of medicine professor at the University of Padua Medical School.Based on the belief that “bad air” was to blame for what became known as the Black Death, Venetian authorities closed churches and restaurants, canceled religious processions and ordered a thorough cleaning of homes and public venues, Zampieri said.During the pestilence that erupted in 1423, Venice’s senate decided to lock down the whole city, prohibiting entry of people from suspected plague-ridden places and punishing locals who gave sick foreigners shelter with six months in jail, he said. A year later, Venice opened the first “lazzaretto,” a hospital on an isolated island in the Venetian lagoon dedicated exclusively to plague victims. That concept would transform years later into a proper quarantine, an isolated place for people merely suspected of carrying the plague — crews of merchant ships — to wait out 40 days of surveillance while their cargo was disinfected, he said.During the 1575-1577 plague, doctors increasingly used the beak-nosed masks filled with aromatic herbs to try to protect themselves from the sick, still not realizing that the plague was carried mostly by bacteria-infected fleas on rats, not “bad air.””It was still a crucial experience for the history of medicine, the history of health care and the history of managing infectious diseases,” Zampieri said.After the 1630 pestilence again wiped out around a third of the population, weary Venetians gave thanks to the Virgin Mary that even more lives weren’t taken: They built the Santa Maria della Salute (St. Mary of Health) church across the Grand Canal from St. Mark’s Square, one of the city’s most visible and iconic images.The central location of the huge, white octagonal domed basilica at the tip of Venice’s custom’s port was entirely intentional, to show the city’s gratitude that it had once again survived and rebounded from the pestilence, said art historian Silvia Marchiori, curator of the Venice Patriarchate’s Manfrediniana museum. “When you arrived in Venice, you arrived from the sea, not land, so you had to notice this great temple that was built in white Istrian stone to attract attention,” she said. To this day, Venetians venerate an icon of the Madonna in the basilica during one of the city’s main religious festivals on Nov. 21, a day dedicated to offering prayers for good health, she said.Whether by prayer, public health policy or discipline, Venice as a whole fared relatively well during its latest pandemic. The city took the extraordinary decision in February 2020 — when coronavirus was just beginning to be detected in northern Italy — to cancel its famous Carnival. It stayed locked down during the worst of the pandemic, watching as neighboring Lombardy and even parts of the surrounding Veneto region got slammed with infections and deaths in one of Europe’s worst-hit countries.Venice has been rewarded with a steady return of visitors this spring and summer, just in time for celebrations marking the 1,600th anniversary of the founding of the city, the film festival, sailing regattas and star-studded fashion shows by Valentino and Dolce & Gabbana. It’s all part of Venice’s efforts to attract visitors who stay, spend and appreciate the city’s history and artistry, rather than day-trippers who take a gondola ride down the Grand Canal and call it a day, said tourism chief Venturini.”These are the pillars on which we’re building a post-COVID tourism,” he said.