The inclusion of controversial directors and a continued gender imbalance have dominated the buildup to the 76th edition of the Venice film festival, while a mix of Hollywood A-listers and arthouse auteurs looks likely to provide another attention-grabbing event.
Hirokazu Kore-eda – who won the Palme d’Or in 2018 for his film Shoplifters – opens the festival on Wednesday with The Truth, which stars Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche. The French-language drama will be the first film the director has made that won’t be in his native Japanese, while the French director Olivier Assayas also moves into new linguistic territory with his English-language spy thriller Wasp Network.
The coveted opening slot is usually reserved for an awards season hopeful and Venice has garnered a reputation as an Oscar omen over recent years, after hosting world premieres for three of the past five best picture Oscar winners.
The Truth
Venice’s opening night spot goes to the latest film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose Shoplifters won top prize at Cannes last year. Catherine Deneuve plays an ailing French star who returns home for a tricky reconciliation with daughter Juliette Binoche, accompanied by her husband (Ethan Hawke) and young child.
Joker
Joaquin Phoenix is the cracked aspirant comedian in this drama from Todd Philips that’s reportedly 80% King of Comedy to 20% The Dark Knight. Robert De Niro co-stars in what could well be the first comic book movie to bag a best picture Oscar.
Marriage Story
Noah Baumbach’s latest is the story of a cross-coastal divorce starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. Like his most recent film, The Meyerowitz Stories, this has been bankrolled by Netflix. Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta co-star as loved ones – and lawyers.
The King
Man of the moment Timothée Chalamet is Henry V in this lush, tough Shakespeare adaptation from David Michôd. Ben Mendelsohn is Henry’s father; Robert Pattinson, Joel Edgerton and Chalamet’s girlfriend, Lily-Rose Depp, offer support.
The Laundromat
Meryl Streep leads Steven Soderbergh’s fictionalised take on the Panama Papers leak. Streep and Soderbergh are sailing to Europe on the Queen Mary 2, shooting another feature en route.
Seberg
Kristen Stewart plays Jean Seberg in this biopic focusing on the actor’s years as an FBI target on account of her support for the Black Panther party – taking a role which Stewart’s mentor, Jodie Foster, first considered playing in 1991.
An Officer and a Spy
A controversial slice of history – the Dreyfus affair – is brought to the big screen by a controversial director: Roman Polanski. Starring Jean Dujardin, it is based on the book by Robert Harris.
The Perfect Candidate
Saudi Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour – one of only two women with films in competition – returns after the success of 2012’s Wadjda with the tale of a young doctor who makes a bid for office in a municipal election.
Ad Astra
Brad Pitt follows in the footsteps of Sandra Bullock, Ryan Gosling and Matt Damon by heading into space in search of awards. James Gray’s drama will be a major player at Venice; Liv Tyler, Tommy Lee Jones and Ruth Negga co-star.
American Skin
Nate Parker’s slavery epic Birth of a Nation won raves in 2016 before allegations of sexual misconduct by Parker took the shine off considerably. His belated return is a revenge drama about a janitor whose son is killed by a police officer.
Netflix continues its romance with the festival, and will again use it as a launchpad for its own trio of Oscar hopefuls. Steven Soderbergh’s Panama Papers drama The Laundromat, Noah Baumbach’s study of divorce, Marriage Story, and David Michôd’s Shakespeare adaptation, The King (starring Robert Pattinson and Timothée Chalamet), will all feature at the Venice Lido. Martin Scorsese’s mob saga, The Irishman, which was bought by Netflix, will not be showing at the festival despite earlier rumours it would. Amazon is represented by political thriller Seberg, which stars Kristen Stewart as actor Jean Seberg, who was targeted by the FBI because of her support for the Black Panthers.
The James Gray-directed science fiction epic Ad Astra follows in the footsteps of last year’s moon-landing drama First Men, with Brad Pitt starring as an astronaut in search of his father. The Lido will also play host to the latest evolution in superhero films with Todd Phillips’s Batman spin-off, The Joker, which stars Joaquin Phoenix and is being spoken about as a dark horse for awards season.
Divisive directors are another feature of this year’s festival. Roman Polanski debuts his latest project An Officer and a Spy, his film about the Dreyfus affair starring Jean Dujardin and Louis Garrel. The director – who was expelled from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for his continued avoidance of an arrest warrant over his 1978 conviction for child sex charges – has been given a competition slot.
Another controversial inclusion is Nate Parker, the actor and director who won the grand jury prize at Sundance in 2016 for his slavery drama The Birth of a Nation, before a historical rape allegation resurfaced and the film went on to lose millions for Fox after it was bought for $17.5m. Parker and his college roommate, Jean Celestin, were accused of raping a woman while at university in the late 90s. Parker was acquitted while Celestin was convicted, although this was overturned. The woman later killed herself.
American Skin is his first film since The Birth of a Nation and is being “presented” by Spike Lee, with Parker starring as an Iraq war veteran whose teenage son is killed by a white police officer.
The dearth of female film-makers – only Shannon Murphy (Babyteeth) and Haifaa Al-Mansour (The Perfect Candidate) are represented in the 21-film main competition – has again been a talking point. Last year there was only one film directed by a woman, Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, with the Venice chief, Alberto Barbera, saying it would be “really offensive for the director” to be included because of their gender and that selections were made “on the basis of the quality of the film”.
This year Barbera pointed to films such as Pablo Larraín’s Ema and Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Anastasia Mikova’s documentary, which will screen out of competition, as some of the films that are “dedicated to the female condition”.
“Women directors are unfortunately still a minority,” he said. “But these portraits of women, even when they are directed by men, reveal a new sensibility geared towards the feminine universe, as had rarely happened in the past. This is a signal that perhaps the polemics of recent years have made an impact in our sensibility and our culture.”
Toronto film festival, which runs at the same time as Venice, says 35% of its films are directed by women, while Cannes had four female-directed film competing for the Palme d’Or, while in February there were seven women eligible for Berlin’s top prize, the Golden Bear.
Prestige TV is also represented by the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, who premieres his Young Pope follow-up, The New Pope, which stars Jude Law and is a Sky/HBO TV series. Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Burnt Orange Heresy is the closing film this year and sees Mick Jagger play a reclusive art dealer in a heist movie that also features Donald Sutherland, as the director returns to Venice for the first time since his 2009 debut, The Double Hour.
The 76th annual Venice Film Festival runs from 29 August to 7 September.
