Venice Film Festival – In a recorded message played during the opening ceremony on the Lido island, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged the audience “not to remain silent, not to be fearful… not to remain indifferent to the war in Ukraine.”
He concluded his address by listing the names of 358 children who had died since the Russian invasion, describing it as “a nightmare which is not 120 minutes long but 189 days long.”
The longest-running film festival in the world celebrated the 90th anniversary of its first edition by having Hillary Clinton and other famous people walk the red carpet.
The first of four Netflix-produced films competing for the coveted Golden Lion as the streamer looks to establish its artistic credentials is the opening picture White Noise.
In the film, Greta Gerwig plays his wife, while Driver plays a professor of Hitler studies in a tiny college town that has recently experienced a “Airborne Toxic Event” and is in need of trustworthy information.
Following their acclaimed collaboration on Marriage Story, director Noah Baumbach reunites Driver with him for this witty and biting parody of US commercial society and intellectual navel-gazing.
Baumbach told reporters that despite being based on a well-known Don DeLillo novel from 1985, he “couldn’t believe how contemporary it seemed” when he reread it in 2020.
To portray a middle-aged parent, Driver joked that he overdid it by gaining weight: “I took on weight and we had a back-up stomach — and then we didn’t need the back-up stomach.”
The annual celebration, “La Mostra,” which is held on the beach-lined Lido island, is scheduled to kick off campaigning for the Academy Awards.
Including the most recent winner Jane Campion for Power of the Dog, another Netflix production, eight of the last ten Best Director Oscars have gone to movies that had their world premieres in Venice.
Catherine Deneuve, a French actress who was at the Lido on Wednesday to get a lifetime achievement award, was also there. She had a Ukrainian flag attached to her blazer.
The infamously blunt Deneuve, a French icon since the 1960s, didn’t appear surprised by the honour.
The 78-year-old told AFP, “One doesn’t look back.” “It’s only that one doesn’t have time, therefore it’s not a refuse. A few weeks ago, I was filming in Paris, and in less than a month, I’ll be starting an English-language feature in Belgium.”
The 23 films vying for the affections of a jury presided over by US actress Julianne Moore over the next 10 days are heavily influenced by Hollywood and Western Europe.
Timothee Chalamet’s new road movie Bones and All, which debuts on Friday and stars him as a love-lorn cannibal, is sure to satisfy fans of the actor. It also reunites him with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino.
The Whale, a film by Darren Aronofsky, who won the Golden Lion for The Wrestler in 2008, stars Brendan Fraser as a morbidly obese dad wanting to reconcile with his daughter.
While conventional Hollywood studios are fixated on superhero and franchise blockbusters, Netflix has emerged as a major supporter of more intellectual directors. Netflix is still vying for its first Best Picture Oscar.
Later on in the festival, the streamer will debut Blonde, a dark version of Marilyn Monroe’s sad life, which is starring rising talent Ana de Armas.
Additionally, it is the driving force for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s most recent film, Bardo, which was released in Venice together with his earlier works, Birdman and The Revenant, all of which won Academy Awards.
However, Don’t Worry Darling, a movie that is screening without competition on Monday and stars music superstar Harry Styles in his first main role under the direction of his fiancée Olivia Wilde, is the one that is most likely to make people talk.
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