Venice creations

The oldest international film forum opens

For the sixty-fifth time, Venice hosts guests and participants of the prestigious film festival - the festival was first held under Mussolini in 1932. The guest of honor at the opening was our Ksenia Rappoport (“The Stranger” by Giuseppe Tornatore, in which the actress received the David Donatello Prize; “St. George’s Day” by Kirill Serebrennikov). She will present to the guests the jury headed by director Wim Wenders, and then the opening film - another sarcastic tragicomedy by the Coen brothers, Burn After Reading, starring George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich and Brad Pitt. Dante Ferretti, the famous film artist who worked with Fellini, Pasolini, Gilliam and Scorsese, winner of two Oscars - for “The Aviator” and “Sweeney Todd”, took care of the new visual image of the festival. The competition program includes twenty-one films, including new works by directors such as Daren Aronofsky, Kathryn Bigelow, Jonathan Demme, Pappy Corsicato, Takeshi Kitano, Pupi Awati, Barbette Schroeder and two animated films from classics of the genre - Hayao Miyazaki and Mamuro Oshii.

Russia is represented in the main competition by Alexey German Jr. with “Paper Soldier”. The “Horizons” program also includes “Wild Field” by Mikhail Kalatozishvili, based on the script by Pyotr Lutsik and Alexey Samoryadov. The main retrospective should be the program “Those Phantoms: Rediscovered Italian Cinema 1946-1975” - rarities collected from various repositories, restored and returned to the viewer, thirty-three little-known films even to professionals, whose creators nevertheless include Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Roberto Zampa and Federico Fellini. It is quite possible that it is these films, and not the latest achievements of world cinematography, that will turn out to be the key event of the festival - for many years now, such retrospectives have made it clear that the most important thing in world cinema has already been done, and all sorts of innovations are nothing more than a repetition of what has been too well forgotten old

Gleb MYSHKIN