The late-summer scrap for high-prestige premieres and awards-friendly titles between the Toronto, Telluride and Venice film festivals has become a highlight of the film industry calendar. A few years ago it looked as if Toronto, with its proximity to lucrative North American markets and shortish skip by private jet from Burbank airport, was comprehensively outpunching its more venerable Italian rival, while it also declared battle on the Colorado weekender. However, in recent editions, Venice has asserted itself, giving a platform to Birdman last year, and Gravity the year before that, to re-establish itself as a powerful presence on the film festival circuit.
The festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera had already announced two big world premieres: the mountaineering drama Everest, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, about the real-life disaster in 1996 when eight climbers died, and Black Mass, the biopic of notorious gangster Whitey Bulger featuring Johnny Depp. Neither will be competing for the Golden Lion; but another headlining world premiere The Danish Girl, directed by Les Miserables’ Tom Hooper and featuring Eddie Redmayne as gender reassignment surgery pioneer Einar Wegener in his first post-Theory of Everything role, will.
Venice has secured other major first looks of films that will subsequently be shown at Toronto, part of the complicated dance of scheduling between the two events, as well as Telluride, which is sandwiched between the two. Beasts of No Nation, the Africa-set child-soldier drama with Idris Elba, which garnered industry attention after Netflix purchased its screening rights, will have its world premiere in Venice, as will Spotlight, a drama about child abuse in the Catholic church featuring Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Michael Keaton. Also making the trip to Toronto after Venice world premieres will be the Atom Egoyan-directed Remember, a revenge thriller centred on a former concentration camp guard living in the US under an assumed name, starring Christopher Plummer, and Anomalisa, the stop-motion animated film with which director Charlie Kaufman set a crowdfunding record on Kickstarter.
The Venice selection is also influenced by its central competition strand – which Toronto lacks, although they are innovating this year with a new, juried sidebar – and so can focus its efforts on including classy arthouse films which won’t be crowded out by the more commercial titles. Highlights of the competition include A Bigger Splash, from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who reunites with his I Am Love star Tilda Swinton for a study of jealousy and sexual tension set on a small island; The Clan, from Argentina’s Pablo Trapero, about a real-life Buenos Aires family specialising in kidnap and murder; and Equals, from Like Crazy director Drake Doremus, a future-set sci-fi drama featuring Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult.
Venice has also found room for notable directorial names like Israel’s Amos Gitai, whose Rabin, the Last Day chronicles the 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Russia’s Alexander Sokurov, with Francofonia: The Louvre Under German Occupation which looks to be a companion piece to his epic Hermitage film Russian Ark. Celebrated performance artist Laurie Anderson, of O Superman renown, will also be competing, with Heart of a Dog, an essay film about her terrier, Lolabelle.
Festival programmers have also pulled in a number of intriguing films for Venice’s out-of-competition sections. Its documentary strand features new work from Frederick Wiseman, who returns with In Jackson Heights, focussing on immigrant communities in the diverse New York neighbourhood and West of Memphis director Amy Berg’s film about blues rocker Janis Joplin; while environmental photographer Yann-Arthus Bertrand is screening his essay film Human, a follow-up to his 2009 film Home.
And buried in the special screenings Fiction section is arguably the most intriguing film of all: a little item called The Audition, directed by someone called Martin Scorsese. Is it another one of his celebrated music documentaries, featuring never before seen footage of the Beatles trying to impress Brian Epstein, or the Rolling Stones angling for their first record deal? Apparently not: it appears to be the 16-minute short featuring Robert de Niro, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, funded as a promotional film at enormous expense by a casino in Macau.
The Venice film festival runs from 2-12 September 2015.
