Venice Film Festival 2015 Preview

Venice 2015
Venice 2015

Venice Film Festival

2 – 12 September 2015

Venice, Italy

Venice website

The 72nd edition of the Venice Film Festival is underway and opening this year’s festival is Baltasar Kormákur‘s survival thriller Everest, while Scott Cooper’s highly anticipated gangster drama Black Mass, screens out of Competition.

Among the 21 titles competing for the Golden Lion this year are Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, a love story inspired by the live of the artist Einar Wegener, who became one of the world’s first transgender women, and Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight, starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo in the true story of how the Boston Globe revealed a child molestation cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese. Other promising titles include Drake Doremus’ Equals, a futuristic love story set in a world where emotions have been eradicated, along with A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino’s star-studded remake of Jacques Deray’s superb 1969 thriller La piscine, 11 Minutes by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski (Essential Killing), and Heart of A Dog, the feature debut of experimental performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson. We will also check out Atom Egoyan’s revenge thriller Remember, Marco Bellocchio’s Sangue Del Mio Sangue (Blood Of My Blood), Charlie Kaufman’s animation feature Anomalisa, and Pablo Trapero’s crime family story El Clan, produced by Pedro and Augustin Almodóvar.

Beyond its Competition line-up, Venice has a strong penchant for documentaries which are almost always worth a watch. This year Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow will present their co-directed documentary De Palma, while documentary-veteran Frederick Wiseman returns with In Jackson Heights. Plus, one of the most controversial works on show could be Helmut Berger, Actor, a relentless, yet intimate portrait of the legendary actor and former Luchino Visconti “muse” Helmut Berger.

The Horizons sidebar, another competitive section that runs parallel, features The Childhood Of A Leader by actor-turned-director Brady Corbet, alongside Danish drama A War, about an officer who is put on trial upon his return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, directed by A Hijacking director Tobias Lindholm.

Pamela Jahn

For more information about the programme visit the Venice website.