P.er the Venice Film Festival 2022 the countdown begins at the endbut there are still fireworks – and not a few – for this 90th anniversary of the event. The first is all Italian: the highly anticipated The lord of the ants by Gianni Amelioa call to social awareness that is one of the fil rouge of Venice 79as they show Argentina, 1985 by Santiago Miter (with his cry: “Nunca más! “) or All the Beauty and the Bloodshed by Laura Poitras.
Luigi Lo Cascio in “The Lord of the Ants”. (photo Claudio Iannone)
The lord of the ants by Gianni Amelio
Luigi Lo Cascio plays the playwright and poet Aldo Braibanti (with a passion for myrmecology, the study of ants, hence the title) who in 1968 was sentenced to nine years in prison accused of having plagiarized a student and friend of his (later sent to a psychiatric hospital by his family and subjected to electroshock). Elio Germano is the journalist who tries to reaffirm the truth: the crime of plagiarism, canceled shortly after by the criminal code, it was used to “get rid” of the “different” of all kinds.
Elio Germano in “The lord of the ants”. (photo Claudio Iannone)
The Inquisition today
Why repeat this story today? «The spectator will be able to ask: how was it possible, how could it happen? Even if apparently we are no longer scandalized by anything, the odyssey of the “lord of the ants” is one of those who know of the inquisition, and we have the proofs of it every day “he explains Amelio, who in 1998 won the Golden Lion with So they laughed. “In substance, not much has changed. Behind a permissive facade, prejudices exist and still resist, generating hatred and contempt for every ‘irregular’. But it is not more time to suffer or tolerate any form of abuse towards less protected individuals. And this film wants to instill the courage to rebel“.
At school with Lady D
It’s no surprise to find a festival regulars like Tilda Swinton, who this time even does two – impersonating both mother and daughter – for The Eternal Daughter by Joanna Hogg, friend and former schoolmate (they were also in class with Diana Spencer, Lady Di) as well as accomplice for what has become a cult movie: The Souvenir Part I And Part II.
The plot in short: the confrontation between an artist and her mother after returning to the old family home, transformed into a hotel but full of secrets. The Hogg – as demonstrated in The Souvenir, in which he retraced his beginnings as a filmmaker – loves autobiographical cues. “In 2008 I decided to write a screenplay that could capture, at least in part, the bond I have with my elderly mother,” she explains. “Growing up during the Second World War, she belongs to a generation of women who kept their feelings hidden, she had experienced the loss without knowing how to transform the pain, and at times he lived between regrets and guilt. Two years ago I finally decided to set it in a creepy and mysterious hotel. I understood that ghosts can intertwine with our deepest and most intimate emotions ».
TIlda Swinton in “The Eternal Daughter”.
Contemporary Western
Out of competition, an author’s reinterpretation of the western arrives: Dead For A Dollardirected by Walter Hill with a luxury cast: Christoph Waltz, cast by Tarantino, Willem Dafoe and Rachel Brosnahannow universally known as The wonderful Mrs. Maisel of the series streamed on Amazon Prime Video. We are in Mexico in 1897, and a bounty hunter (Waltz) meets the professional and outlaw player (Dafoe), his sworn enemy. He is on a mission to find and bring home the wife (Brosnahan) of a wealthy Santa Fe businessman, who has been taken hostage. When she discovers that she actually escaped from a forced marriage, she is faced with a choice: finish the job he was hired for (and cheated on), or step aside as ruthless mercenaries and his old rival draw near … He has nothing to gain if he resists but honor …
Rachel Brosnahan, Christoph Waltz and Warren Burke in “Dead for a Dollar”.
Glory to the Filmmaker in Walter Hill
In the Great Hall at 9.45 pm – before the screening of Dead For A Dollar – Walter Hill will be awarded the prize Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker of Venice 79. «Thanks to all of you, you made an elderly person happy» commented – as soon as he heard of the award – the director of The warriors of the night, 48 hours, Still alive (just to name a few), at the Lido for the fourth time: almost a gift for his 80th birthday, just in 2022.
“Whether you measure it with the western and the thriller, the horror, the war films or the detective story”, explained in the motivation Alberto Barbera, director of the exhibition, “Hill does not give up making it an opportunity to build formal and narrative geometries that aspire both to to tell the contemporary world through gender stereotypes, both to propose an ethical point of view that disregards and goes beyond the traditional dividing line between good and evil ”. Eh, the fil rouge of the Venice Film Festival.
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