Venice Film Festival, Aug. 31-Sept. 10, 2022

[Chris Knipp]

Thurs. again


IMAGE FROM THE DAMNED DON'T CRY

THE DAMNED DON'T CRY (Fyzal Boulifa) Bradshaw's GUARDIAN review gives four out of five starst to the Moroccan-English filmmaker's "mournful portrait of colonial tension" which "explores the decisions forced on a poverty-stricken Moroccan family" in a "vivid and powerful drama." He explains it is a follow-up to his LYNN + LUCY, a 'social-realist psychodrama" about "female friendship on an Essex housing estate." Here an impoverished mother and teenage son wind up in Tangier, Morocco and the boy turning to selling himself for sex like his mother - an ugly tale but a film that "shows style and real storytelling verve."

IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN (Michalangelo Antonioni 1982). This rerelease may or may not help rehabilitate the Italian director's reputation that declined toward the end. It concerns a movie director who is auditioning young women and. rather lost, has affairs with two women, with beautifully photographed scenes in Venice and at a grand party. Would be a comedy in other hands, Bradshaw says, and perhaps Antonioni intends a comic element. Not yet dated enough to view with detachment, he concludes. Bradshaw's GUARDIAN review grants it three out of five stars. It does not sound edifying but must be necessary for cinephiles to know about.


IMAGE FROM IDENTIFICAZIONE DI UNA DONNA

[Bradshaw has begun publishing reviews from Toronto.]

[Chris Knipp]

Venice 2022 Awards


LAURA POITRAS RECEIVES THE 'LEONE D'ORO'

Best film:
Golden Lion goes to Laura Poitras for her documentary about Nan Golden and the Sackler family and the US opioid epidemic, ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED. (For the Filmleaf description of ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, see HERE.) Poitras previously won the Oscar for her Edward Snowden documentary debuted at the 2014 NYFF, CITIZEN FOUR.

"Runner-up" title went to Alice Diop's SAINT OMER, feature about a woman on trial for infanticide. “...extraordinary first fiction feature...” "using the trial of a Senegalese woman guilty of killing her infant to honestly explore the complexities of motherhood while foregrounding it all within France’s racist currents." -Jay Weissberg (THE FILM VERDICT).

The last two GOLDEN LIONS were to Audrey Diwan for HAPPENING (2021) and Chloé Zhao for NOMADLAND (2020).

Best Director:
Silver Lion goes to Luca Guadagnino for BONES AND ALL starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell in a young cannibal romance road picture.

Best young actress
Taylor Russell in BONES AND ALL

Acting awards:
BEST ACTRESS: To CATE BLANCHETT for her starring role in Todd Field's TÁR, playing an orchestra leader.
BEST ACTOR: To COLIN FARRELL for his role in Martin McDonach's THE BANSHEES OF INISHIRIN.

Best Screenplay:
MARTIN MCDONAGH for THE BANSHEES OF ININSHIRIN

Special Award:
Jafar Panahi for NO BEARS. Panahi has now been jailed in Iran on a six-year former charge not previously enforced.

[oscar jubis]

So the best two films were directed by females, and the directors who won the Golden Lion in the previous two years are also women. Is this a sign that the industry is truly becoming more accessible to women filmmakers?

[Chris Knipp]

I didn't even notice. I don't pay attention to these things.
IN answer to your question: No. Not necessarily. It's most of all a sign that these women are making good films, and jurors are trying to reward them.

I've been writing about Claire Denis, certainly one of my all-time fovorite directors, who is definitely a woman.

Also one of my all time favorite writers is a woman, Jane Austen, and one of the greatest novels in English of all time is Middlemarch, by George Eliot, a woman.

But n the plastic arts, in painting, women don't matter very much to me. And in classical music or jazz, not so many women stand out. Exceptions: Martha Argerich (big one) and Marin Alsop (pioneer woman director: I've reviewed the documentary about her. And she was the BSO conductor - Baltimore, my home town!)

[Chris Knipp]

P.s. IN the new documentary My Imaginary Country/Mi país imaginario by Patricio Guzmán coming out Sept. 23 I will have a review) I was struck that all of the people in it are women and the people who created a new government and a new constitution of Chile were for the first time equally represented of both sexes, the film says. This is how it has to be now, patriarchy must end or there can be no real equality and hence no justice.

[Chris Knipp]

Notice Toronto is on. I've not been attempting to cover it remotely. It's the biggest one around. That's why. But Bradshaw has been doing his usual quick, accessible coverage so I may report from it, if time allows.