Queer Lion 2019
Out of competition
Les épouvantails (The Scarecrows) by Nouri Bouzid with Nour Hajri, Afef Ben Mahmoud, Joumene Limam (Tunisia, Morocco, Luxembourg, 98′, 2019)
In late 2013, Zina and Djo, both in their twenties, come back to Tunisia from the Syrian front where they were sequestrated and raped. Zina was separated from her two-month-old child and Djo finds out she’s pregnant and plunges into mutism and expresses her Syrian horror only in the novel she is writing. Tunisian lawyer Nadia and Dora, a humanitarian doctor, assist them in their hard and lengthy reconstruction; impeded by the violence of their close circles, the harsh view on the social networks and their angst. Nadia, also Driss’ lawyer, a 21-year- old persecuted homosexual who’s been banned from all school establishments, asks him to help Zina in the hopes that their stirring meeting will allow them to open their black boxes, to assume themselves and stand up to the unjust society.
Presentato nella sezione Sconfini
Seules les Bêtes (Only the Animals) by Dominik Moll with Denis Menochet, Laure Calamy, Damien Bonnard, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (France, Germany, 116′, 2019)
A woman has disappeared. The day after a snowstorm, her car is found on a road leading to a plateau with with nothing but a few scattered farms. The gendarmes have nothing to go on, while five individuals well know they have something to do with the woman’s disappearance. They all keep their secrets to themselves, but no one suspects that the whole story began far from these windswept wintry peaks: on another continent, in the burning sun, where poverty doesn’t stop desire from taking the law into its own hands.
“All five characters are pursuing an instinctual need to be loved, even if it leads to some bad choices. The most, if not only, emotionally moving chapter in the film belongs to the dead woman, a married bisexual named Evelyne (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). After picking up a waitress named Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz, very affecting) at the restaurant where she works, the two begin sleeping together. While Evelyne soon makes it clear she’s in it for the sex, Marion has fallen deeply in love. Evelyne’s cruel behavior toward Marion suggests that heartlessly denying a basic emotional need to another person makes you a prime candidate to get bumped off.” (Variety)
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) by Pedro Almodóvar with Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Julieta Serrano, Rossy de Palma (Spain, 88’, 1988)
Presented in competition at the 1988 Venice Film Festival, and Almodóvar’s first major international success, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is, straight from the opening credits, an instant icon of queer cinematography. The palette of vivid colours, the references to queer culture (from Jean Cocteau, whose theatrical play La voix humaine provides the basic plot for the film’s screenplay, to LGBT cult movies such as Johnny Guitar by Nicholas Ray and The Wizard of Oz by Victor Fleming), the theatrical set designs, the blatantly kitsch details like the memorable “Mambo Taxi” and its unlikely owner, the love for over the top melodrama, are all elements that become as important as the main characters of this firecracking farce.
Presented in the section Career Achievement Golden Lion
Darling by Saim Sadiq with Abdullah Malik, Alina Khan, Mehar Bano, Nadia Afgan (Pakistan, Usa, 16′, 2019)
Set in a dance theatre in Lahore where the story revolves around a young boy and a trans girl.
Saim Sadiq’s Darling will be the First Pakistani Film to Screen at the Venice Film Festival.
Presented in Orizzonti
Le Coup des larmes by Clémence Poésy with India Hair, Sabine Timoteo (France, 20′, 2019)
Florence is an actress. Preparations for her new role will challenge her in a way she could never have seen coming.
Presented in Orizzonti
GUO4 by Peter Strickland with Gyula Muskovics, Csaba Molnár (Hungary, 3′, 2019)
A confrontation between two swimmers in a locker room.
GUO4 is a short film project by Peter Strickland in collaboration with GUO, a multidisciplinary duo formed of Daniel Blumberg and Seymour Wright.
Presented in Orizzonti
Ji yuan tai qi hao (No.7 Cherry Lane) by Yonfan voices by Sylvia Chang, Zhao Wei, Alex Lam, Yao Wei, Tian Zhuangzhuang (Hong Kong, China, 125′, 2019)
During the rise of the materialistic comfort of life in the 1960s, there emerges an undercurrent of danger in Hong Kong. No. 7 Cherry Lane tells the tale of Ziming, a Hong Kong University undergraduate, entangled between his amorous feelings for Mrs Yu, a self-exiled mother from Taiwan in the White Terror period, and her beautiful daughter Meiling. He takes them to different movies and through a series of magical moments on the big screen, reality and fantasy start to melt in a crescendo of forbidden passions and scenes of extreme sensuality where all inhibitions seem to drop and the actual sexual orientation of the main characters no longer matters. The era coincides with Hong Kong’s turbulent times of 1967.
Presented in Venezia 76
Victor Victoria by Blake Edwards with Julie Andrews, James Garner, Robert Preston (Usa, Uk, 132’, 1982)
A whirlwind of innuendos, misunderstandings and memorable musical numbers in this smashing 1982 comedy of errors.
Victoria Grant is a poverty-stricken soprano trying to find work in 1934 “gay Paree”. With the help of a worldly-wise homosexual nightclub singer, she invents her alter-ego Victor, a female impersonator who is hired to sing at a fashionable night spot and instantly becomes the toast of the town. “You want me to be a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman?”
Interwoven throughout the comedy and musical numbers are some surprisingly astute observations about gender perceptions, discrimination and the battle of the sexes.
Presented in the section Career Achievement Golden Lion
Bu san (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) by Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan, 82′, 2003)
Dragon Inn is Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang’s attempt to commit Taipei’s Fu-Ho movie theater, a one-time cruising spot for gay patrons, to cinematic memory before it is torn down. Pervasive in its nostalgia, the movie is interspersed with clips from King Hu’s 1966 wuxia classic Dragon Inn. Playing on the theater’s last night, the King Hu picture attracts only a few dozen audience members. Every one of them appears to be a lonely soul wandering in out of the pouring rain (the natural meteorological state in a Tsai film).
Over the course of 82 minutes, the audience comes to realize that these characters aren’t interacting with living, breathing human beings but with the ghosts of Dragon Inn’s actors and cinema itself.
The restored version of the film Bu San (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) by Tsai Ming-Liang, presented at the Venice International Film Festival in 2003, will screen on Tuesday 3 September at 11 am and 3 pm at the Teatro alle Tese in the Venice Arsenale. At 12:30 and 4:30 pm, a live performance by Tsai Ming-liang titled “Improvisations on the Memory of Cinema”.
Presented in Special Event
Crash by David Cronenberg with James Spader, Elias Koteas, Holly Hunter, Rosanna Arquette (Canada, 100’, 1996)
David Cronenberg adapts James G. Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same title, widening his personal exploration of the links between human bodies and machines: after a severe car crash, film producer James Ballard starts linking his sexual pleasure to the dangers of driving and the mutilations caused by car crashes. He therefore ends up meeting other car crashes fetishists, among them the mysterious, charismatic Vaughan.
During several sexual intercourses, the characters rarely make eye contact, Cronenberg builds cold compositions of sexual architectures, mostly shot from the back. Exception being the gay sex scene between Ballard and Vaughan containing the first kiss.
Controversial movie, greeted by cheers and boos upon receiving a Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, Crash has become, over the years, an undisputed cult movie and is now considered one of the fundamental titles in the filmography of Canadian director Cronenberg.
Presented in Venezia Classici
