Three Italian hopefuls
including a keenly awaited biopic of the most loved poet after
Dante, Giacomo Leopardi, are vying for the Golden Lion with 52
other contenders for the top prize at the world's oldest film
fest opening in Venice Wednesday night.
The festival will see a mix of new and old talent on the
red carpet, from Al Pacino and Catherine Deneuve to Emma Stone
and Adam Driver.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's black comedy Birdman will
kick off this year's awards season as the opening film in
Venice.
Keen cinephile Giorgio Napolitano, the Italian president,
will be in the front row.
Starring Michael Keaton as a washed-up actor who made his
name playing an iconic superhero but is currently struggling to
stage a Broadway play, Birdman premieres in competition on
August 27.
The star-studded cast also includes Edward Norton, Zach
Galifianakis, Stone and Naomi Watts.
Like last year's festival opener, Gravity, which was
directed by Inarritu's pal Alfonso Cuaron, Birdman is pegged as
an early Oscar contender.
Festival director Alberto Barbera has admitted to not
knowing much about the younger generation of talent that will
grace the red carpet.
"The young people ask for actors like Adam Driver or Emma
Stone, that few adults know about. Meanwhile, having Catherine
Deneuve here is something that the kids certainly won't even
notice," said Barbera.
At the 71st edition of the film festival, running through
September 6th, paparazzi will clamor at the Lido for shots of
Stone with beau Andrew Garfield, her costar in Spiderman, star
of the much-anticipated film 99 Homes by director Ramin Bahrani
which will be shown in Venice.
Other stars with films at the festival this year include
Pacino, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Ethan Hawke, Viggo Mortensen,
Frances McDormand, and Owen Wilson.
The three Italian films in competition are touted as
presenting the best Italian offering for years and giving Italy
a chance to have a two-year winning streak for the Lido's
highest prize.
Following Italy's win last year for the film Sacro GRA,
this year's competition from Italy unfolds between Mario
Martone's 19th-century drama about Italy's greatest poet since
Dante, Il Giovane Favoloso (The Fabulous Young Man) starring
Elio Germano; a screen adaptation of the book Black Souls
directed by Francesco Munzi; and Saverio Costanzo's Hungry
Hearts, starring Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher.
Martone's film centres on Marche-born poet Giacomo
Leopardi, known for his legendary pessimism and immortal odes,
and Italy's most anthologised poet after the Divine Comedy bard,
played here by Germano in the spirit of an anti-conformist
rebel.
The title comes from a short story about the precocious and
prodigiously gifted Leopardi by Anna Maria Ortese.
Hungry Hearts takes place in New York City, where a couple
battles over their son's diet.
In the film, the mother, played by Rohrwacher, insists on
vegan fare, but the father, played by Driver, has to intervene
when their son eventually becomes ill.
The third film in the Italian lineup, Black Souls, tackles
the contemporary state of the Calabrian mafia, known as the
'Ndrangheta.
Black Souls is based on the eponymous book by Gioacchino
Ciriaco, and tells the tale of a farmer's three sons, each of
whom crosses paths with the life of crime in a different way.
Luigi is an international drug trafficker, Rocco is an
adopted son from Milan who is also a businessman with Mafia
money, and the third and oldest brother Luciano stays home,
raising the family's goats.
Each of the three competing films is said to have a good
chance at the prize.
A win would place Italy halfway to another four-year
winning streak like the one from the heyday of 1960s Italian
cinema, when films by the likes of Michelangelo Antonioni and
Luchino Visconti took a Golden Lion home every year from 1963 to
1966.
Among the other highlights from Italy is the premiere of
Italy In a Day, a "collective cinema experiment" put together by
Italian Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Gabriele
Salvatores.
The Naples-born director asked Italians to film their daily
lives on October 26, 2013, and send him the results.
"Tell us who you are, what you love, what you fear," he
says on his Italy in a Day website.
"We will put together a selection and come up with a
photograph of Italy as seen by Italians".
The response was overwhelming.
A whopping 44,197 amateur filmmakers, from youngsters to
80-year-olds, from astronauts to felons in a maximum-security
prison, from doctors to mobsters turned State's witnesses, as
well as many second-generation immigrants - the so-called G2,
who are Italian in everything but citizenship status - turned in
their home-made cinematic efforts.
The footage was shot on cell phones and uploaded using a
special app, Italy in a Day, created for the occasion.
"This was a very interesting, exciting and instructive
experiment," said Salvatores of his project, which is based on
Life in a Day by Tony and Ridley Scott.
The latter was shot by people around the world on July 24,
2010.
The Scott brothers edited together a 94-minute feature with
scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000
submissions from 192 countries.
Italy in a day, which is co-produced by RAI Cinema and Tony
and Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions, is still an open
project and will be developed further, according to producers.
"This is Italy's first ever audio-visual census," one of
the producers told ANSA.
"The material we received was rich and powerful, moving and
exciting. It measures the emotional temperature of the country".
Screening on September 2 out of competition, the 76-minute
feature captures "an ailing Italy, but one that is creative and
full of energy," the producers said.
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