Martin Eden
The programme for the 2019 edition of the Venice Film Festival has been unveiled, and includes new films from Olivier Assayas, Robert Guédiguian, Pietro Marcello, and many more.
COMPETITION
The Truth (Hirokazu Kore-eda): About a stormy reunion between a daughter and her actress mother, Catherine, against the backdrop of Catherine’s latest role in a sci-fi picture as a mother who never grows old.
The Perfect Candidate (Haifaa Al-Mansour)
About Endlessness (Roy Andersson): The film contains a mix of scenes that takes place in the past and present and we meet several historical people, including Prince Ivan the Terrible and Adolf Hitler.
Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas): The story of five Cuban political prisoners who had been imprisoned by the United States since the late 1990s on charges of espionage and murder.
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach): A stage director and his actor wife struggle through a gruelling, coast-to-coast divorce that pushes them to their personal and creative extremes.
Guest of Honour (Atom Egoyan): Explores the relationship between a father and his 20-something year old daughter who wants to remain in jail for a sexual assault she knows she’s been wrongfully indicted for. Father and daughter find themselves acting out of the bounds of good behavior as the past haunts them.
A Herdade (Tiago Guedes): Portuguese filmmaker Tiago Guedes looks at the political, economic, and social history of Portugal from the vantage point of a family line of wealthy homesteaders on a Tagus River estate.
Gloria Mundi (Robert Guédiguian): In Marseille, a family gathers for the birth of baby Gloria. But despite the joy, they have fallen on hard times. However Gloria’s ambitious uncle has a new business idea, which could be a way out of their tough situation.
Waiting for the Barbarians (Ciro Guerra): A British magistrate working in a small colonial town begins to question his loyalty to the Empire.
Ema (Pablo Larraín): A couple deals with the aftermath of an adoption that goes awry as their household falls apart.
Saturday Fiction (Lou Ye): Set in Shanghai in 1941, the film follows an actress who is working undercover gathering intelligence for the Allies, while starring in a new play. She discovers the Japanese plan to attack Pearl Harbor but chooses not to share the information.
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello): Based on novel by Jack London.
La mafia non è più quella di una volta (Franco Maresco)
The Painted Bird (Václav Marhoul): A young Jewish boy in Poland seeks refuge in the forest during World War II where he encounters many different characters.
Il sindaco del rione sanità (Mario Martone)
Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy)
Joker (Todd Phillips): The film will center on how the popular comic book villain known as The Joker came to be.
J'accuse (Roman Polanski): French Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, is wrongfully convicted of treason in 1894 and is sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s island.
The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh): Follows a group of journalists who take part in unearthing 11.5 million files, linking the world’s most powerful political figures to secret banking accounts to avoid taxes.
No.7 Cherry Lane (Yonfan): Set in the politically charged Hong Kong of the 1960s, Yonfan’s animation debut is an atmospheric story of an English literature student who enters into a love triangle with the woman he is tutoring and her middle-aged mother.
OUT OF COMPETITION
Features
The Burnt Orange Heresy (Giuseppe Capotondi): Irresistibly charismatic art critic James Figueras hooks up with provocative and alluring fellow American Berenice Hollis. He’s a classic anti-hero in the making with a charm that masks his deep ambition, while she’s an innocent touring Europe, enjoying the freedom of being whomever she wishes.
Seberg (Benedict Andrews): An ambitious young FBI agent is assigned to investigate iconic actress Jean Seberg when she becomes embroiled in the tumultuous civil rights movement in late 1960s Los Angeles.
Vivere (Francesca Archibugi)
Mosul (Matthew Michael Carnahan)
Adults in the Room (Costa-Gavras)
The King (David Michôd): After his brother is killed in battle before his coronation, a young king is coronated in the late 1300s. The reluctant ruler wears the crown at a time when England was near a war with France, and the empire is teetering. He rises to the occasion, admirably.
Tutto il mio folle amore (Gabriele Salvatores)
Documentaries
Woman (Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Anastasia Mikova)
Roger Waters Us + Them (Sean Evans, Roger Waters)
I diari di Angela - Noi due cineasti. Capitolo secondo. (Yervant Gianikan, Angela Ricci Lucchi)
Citizen K (Alex Gibney)
Citizen Rosi (Didi Gnocchi, Carolina Rosi)
The Kingmaker (Lauren Greenfield)
State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa)
Collective (Alexander Nanau)
45 Seconds of Laughter (Tim Robbins)
Special Screenings
No One Left Behind (Guillermo Arriaga)
Il pianeta in mare (Andrea Segre)
Electric Swan (Konstantina Kotzamani)
Irrevérsible - Inversion Intégrale (Gaspar Noé)
Zerozerozero - Episodes 1 and 2 (Stefano Sollima)
The New Pope - Episodes 2 and 7 (Paolo Sorrentino)
Never Just a Dream: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut (Matt Wells)
Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick)
ORIZZONTI
Zumiriki (Oskar Alegria)
Pelican Blood (Katrin Gebbe): Wiebke, a woman horse trainer adopts little Melva. Soon she discovers the girl suffers from an attachment disorder and doesn’t build any feelings to relatives around. Melva starts putting others at risk, especially her older adoptive sister. After a visit to a neurologist a dilemma begins for Wiebke
Bik eneich - un fils (Mehdi M. Barsoui)
Blanco en Blanco (Théo Court)
Mes jours de gloire (Antoine de Bary)
Nevia (Nunzia de Stefano)
Moffie (Olivier Hermanus)
Hava, Maryam, Ayesha (Sahraa Karimi)
Rialto (Peter Mackie Burns)
The Criminal Man (Dmitry Mamuliya)
Revenir (Jessica Palud)
Giants Being Lonely (Grear Patterson)
Verdict (Raymund Ribay Gutierrez)
Balloon (Pema Tseden)
Just 6.5 (Saeed Roustaee)
Shadow of Water (Sasidharan Sanal Kumar)
Sole (Carlo Sironi)
Madre (Rodrigo Sorogoyen)
Atlantis (Valentyn Vasyanovych)
SPECIAL EVENT
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang)
VENICE CLASSICS
Features
The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold): After an exposure to a strange mist, Scott Carey begins to shrink. After facing such trials as confounded doctors and his angry cat, he accidentally gets locked in the basement.
La Commare Secca (Bernardo Bertolucci): In Bernardo Bertolucci’s stunning debut, the brutalized corpse of a Roman prostitute is found along the banks of the Tiber River. The police round up a handful of possible suspects and interrogate them, one by one, each account bringing them closer to the killer.
The Spider’s Strategem (Bernardo Bertolucci): Athos Magnani, a young researcher, returns to Tara, where his father was killed before his birth, at the request of Draifa.
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Luis Buñuel): With a strange and powerful obsession stemming from his childhood during the Mexican Revolution, the affluent bachelor and suave ceramist, Archibaldo de la Cruz, oscillates effortlessly between fantasy and reality, obsessed in making the perfect crime.
The Passage of the Reno (André Cayatte)
Maria Zef (Vittorio Cottafavi): The story of a 15 year-old peasant, Maria, who decides to go down the mountain during the summer, where she lives with her mother and sister, in order to make some money to support her family during the harsh winter that will arrive.
Crash (David Cronenberg): After surviving a brutal car wreck, commercial director James Ballard finds himself slowly descending into a fetishistic underworld of scarred, omnisexual car-crash victims who find metallic collisions a sexual turn-on and a jolting life force they come to crave.
Francisca (Manoel De Oliveira): The life of a young man, son of an English officer, who lets himself become a prisoner of love resulting in fatalism and disgrace.
The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad): The House is Black is an acclaimed Iranian documentary medium-legth film directed by Forough Farrokhzad.
The White Sheik (Federico Fellini): Ivan Cavalli brings his new wife Wanda to Rome on the least romantic honeymoon in history, a rigid schedule of family meetings and audiences with the Pope. But Wanda, dreaming of the dashing hero of a photo-strip cartoon, drifts off in search of the White Sheik.
In the Current (István Gaál): A group of young people have vacation around a small town. They spend their time playing around, taking life lightly. One day while they are diving at a nearby swimming area, they discover that one of their friends is missing.
The Hills of Marlik (Ebrahim Golestan): A 3,000-year-old site in the north of Iran is simultaneously excavated by archaeologists and fertilized by farmers
The Death of a Bureaucrat (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea): A young man attempts to fight the system in an entertaining account of bureaucracy amok and the tyranny of red tape.
Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper): A longtime convict returns home from prison only to add emotional burdens on his punk rocker teenage daughter.
Ecstasy (Gustav Machatý): A ravishing, pre-Hollywood Hedy Lamarr (then known as Hedy Kiesler) stars as a young woman who marries a wealthy, but much older man – when he proves to be impotent, she flings herself into an adulterous affair with a handsome civil engineer.
Mauri (Merata Mita): Mauri is the story of Rewi, a man haunted by a past which threatens to engulf his future. The story is set among the colourful characters of a once thriving settlement, Te Mata, upon whom the encroachment by Europeans spells disaster.
Tiro al piccione (Giuliano Montaldo):
New York, New York (Martin Scorsese): Romantic musical drama concerning the struggling careers of a young danceband vocalist and the saxophone player who falls in love with her, during the forties and fifties.
The Red Snowball Tree (Vasiliy Shukshin): Drama of a man who tried to live a new life. Yegor Prokudin is a child of a street who grew up in a criminal gang. While he was free, he did not lose his innocent, joyful heart, but many years in prison have taken away his joy in living.
The Great Gaucho (Jacques Tourneur): After inadvertently killing a man, an Argentinian gaucho signs on with the army in order to avoid a jail sentence, then soon after forms a band of outlaws.
Documentaries
Fellini fine mai (Eugenio Cappuccio)
Boia, maschere e segreti: L'horror italiano degli anni sessanta (Steve Della Casa)
800 mal einsam: ein tag mit dem filmemacher Edgar Reitz (Anna Hepp)
Se c'é un aldilà sono fottuto. Vita e cinema di Claudio Caligari (Simone Isola, Fausto Trombetta)
Life As a B-Movie: Piero Vivarelli (Fabrizio Laurenti, Niccolò Vivarelli)
Babenco - Alguém tem que ouvrir o coração e dizer: Parou (Bárbara Paz)
Leap of Faith (Alexandre O. Philippe)
Fulci for Fake (Simone Scafidi)
Tarkovskij Cinema Prayer (Andrej Andrejevich Tarkovskij Jr.)
SCONFINI
Chiara Ferragni - Unposted (Elisa Amoruso)
Les épouvantails (Nouri Bouzid)
Il varco (Federico FErrone, Michele Manzolini)
Effetto domino (Alessandro Rossetto)
BIENNALE COLLEGE
The End of Love (Keren Ben Rafael)
Lessons of Love (Chiara Campara)
This is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (Jeremiah Lemonhang Mosese)
VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM CRITICS' WEEK
Competition
All This Victory (Ahmad Ghossein)
Parthenon (Mantas Kvedaravičius): Based on a three-year ethnographic research. The Kurdish, Sudanese, Ukrainian, Greek people from these locations – squats, secret cafes, underground mosques, brothels, abandoned factories – and their stories were turned into the narrative of this film.
The Prince (Sebastian Muñoz): A ’70s-set homoerotic prison drama based on a low-circulated pulp novel, tracking the sexual, often-violent and eventually murderous experiences of 20-something narcissist Jaime.
Psychosia (Marie Grahtø)
Rare Beasts (Billie Piper)
Scales (Shahad Ameen)
Tony Driver (Ascanio Petrini)
Out of Competition – Opening Night
Bombay Rose (Gitanjali Rao)
Out of Competition – Closing film
Sanctorum (Joshua Gil): In a small town plagued by the war between the army and the drug traffickers, a child has lost his mother. His grandmother has told him that the only way of getting her back is to invoke the forces of nature.
VENICE DAYS
Competition
Only the Animals (Dominik Moll)
You Will Die at 20 (Amjad Abu Alala)
A Bigger World (Fabienne Berthaud)
The Weeping Woman (Jayro Bustamante)
The Long Walk (Mattie Do)
Beware of Children (Dag Johan Haugerud)
5 Is the Perfect Number (Igort)
Corpus Christi (Jan Komasa)
Arab Blues (Manele Labidi)
They Say Nothing Stays the Same (Jō Odagiri)
Lingua Franca (Isabel Sandoval)
Out of Competition
Time of the Untamed (Bartabas)
Special Events
My Brother Chases Dinosaurs (Setfano Cipani)
House of Cardin (P. David Ebersole, Todd Hughes)
The Prisoner (Federico Olivetti)
Scherza con i fanti (Gianfranco Pannone)
Mondo Sexy (Mario Sesti)
Burning Cane (Phillip Youmans)