SHARE
COPY LINK

CULTURE

Race wide open for Venice film festival prizes

The race was wide open ahead of awards night in Venice on Saturday, after a festival featuring a dark Marilyn Monroe biopic, an imprisoned Iranian director and a morbidly obese Brendan Fraser.

Actor Brendan Fraser in Venice
US Canadian actor Brendan Fraser arrives on September 4, 2022 for the screening of the film The Whale presented in the Venezia 79 competition as part of the 79th Venice International Film Festival at Lido di Venezia in Venice, Italy. Photo: Marco BERTORELLO / AFP

Critics have been deeply divided on many of the 23 films in competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival, but it has been a stellar year for individual actors. 

There was a huge standing ovation for Fraser, who made an unlikely comeback from the Hollywood wilderness as a 600-pound (272-kilogram) English professor in The Whale, sparking talk of Oscar nominations and a “Brendanaissance”.

Cate Blanchett is also an awards frontrunner for her performance as a classical music conductor in Tar, which takes a nuanced look at cancel culture.

And Hugh Jackman’s performance as a father dealing with a depressed teenager in The Son has been labelled the best of his career.

Hugh Jackman in Venice

Australian actor Hugh Jackman arrives on September 7, 2022 for the screening of The Son as part of the 79th Venice International Film Festival at Lido di Venezia in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

While some reviewers found the Monroe biopic Blonde too relentlessly grim, most were bowled over by the “ferociously emotional” performance from Cuban star Ana de Armas.

Sexual identity has been a recurring theme across the 11-day festival, with Trace Lysette becoming the first trans actress to star in a competition entry for Monica.

Last year’s best actress winner Penelope Cruz played the mother to a trans teen in L’Immensita, whose director Emanuele Crialese admitted for the first time at its press conference that he was born a woman.

Politics and protest

Picking the winners falls to a jury led by actor Julianne Moore, and also featuring Nobel-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

A last-minute favourite for the top prize Golden Lion is No Bears by Iran’s Jafar Panahi, who was imprisoned for “propaganda against the system” in July. That was the subject of a flash-mob protest Friday on the Venice red
carpet, led by Moore.

President of the Venezia 79 International Jury, US actress Julianne Moore (C) and other jury members hold on September 9, 2022 a poster showing Iranian director Jafar Panahi, calling for his release from prison. (Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP)

Another political film to win rave reviews was the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which follows artist Nan Goldin and her fight against the Sackler family, held responsible for the opioid drug crisis in the United States.

It is the latest from Laura Poitras, the journalist who first made contact with whistleblower Edward Snowden and won an Oscar for the resulting film, Citizenfour.

There has also been a lot of love in Venice for The Banshees of Inisherin, a pitch-black Irish comedy-drama tracing the falling out of two friends played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

Argentina 1985, the true story of the lawyers who took on the country’s military junta, was also widely praised.

Venice is seen as a launchpad for Academy Award campaigns, eight of the last 10 Best Director Oscars having gone to films that premiered at the festival.

Netflix had been hoping for a big year, but Blonde tested the patience of many critics, as did Mexico’s two-time Oscar winner Alejandro Gonzalez Inarrituto, with his fantastical semi-autobiography Bardo.

The streamer is also behind White Noise, a sharp satire of US consumerism and academia starring Adam Driver — but that, too, got a mixed reception from reviewers.

READ ALSO: Ten of the best TV shows and films to help you learn Italian

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

CULTURE

Migrant boats make music at Milan’s La Scala

String instruments made from migrant boats met with sustained applause as they debuted at Italy's prestigious La Scala opera house in tribute to those who perish attempting the Mediterranean crossing to Europe.

Migrant boats make music at Milan's La Scala

The multicoloured “violins of the sea” were made by prisoners out of rickety boats washed up on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, a first port for many seeking to cross from North Africa.

The debut of the “Orchestra of the Sea” with the instruments, formed especially for the occasion, visibly moved the audience.

Two of the violin makers – inmates from the high security Opera prison near Milan – watched Monday’s performance of Bach and Vivaldi from the theatre’s royal box, usually reserved for state dignitaries.

“To be invited to La Scala for something we created is magic” said 42-year-old Claudio, one of the prison’s four apprentice luthiers who is serving a life sentence for two murders.

Cracked and diesel-soaked wood from the migrants’ boats, destined for the scrapyard, was transformed into the violins, violas and cellos.

An inmate collects wood on a migrant boat to make music instruments as part of the project ‘Violins of the sea’ at Opera’s prison, near Milan, on February 8, 2024. Photo by Marco Bertorello / AFP.

‘Giving waste a voice’

“We give voice to everything that is usually thrown away: the wood from boats that is shredded, the migrants who flee war and poverty and are treated like trash, and the prisoners who are not given a second chance,” says Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori, who came up with the idea.

Mosca Mondadori, president of the House of the Spirits and the Arts foundation, hopes the string instruments can be played in other concert halls in Europe, “to touch people’s souls in the face of poverty”.

READ ALSO: Italy’s Lampedusa struggles as migrant arrivals double the population

The central Mediterranean is the deadliest migratory route in the world. Nearly 2,498 people died or disappeared along it last year, some 75 percent more than in 2022.

In a courtyard at the Opera prison, dilapidated boats are strewn across the grass among broken planks of wood.

A pink and white baby shoe, a baby bottle, nappies and a tiny green T-shirt are among items recovered from their holds.

Discarded clothing stiff with salt, rusting cans of sardines, and rudimentary life jackets evoke perilous journeys at the mercy of rough seas. “You can smell the sea here,” within the grey concrete walls of the courtyard, 49-year-old prisoner Andrea said.

“It is very strong and transports you very far. It is present even in the instruments, though less so,” he says as he dismantles boats and searches for suitable wood to make the instruments.

The entrance of the lutherie of the House of the Spirits and the Arts foundation. Photo by Marco Bertorello / AFP.

‘Alive and useful’

Andrea, who is serving a life term for murder, sees the time he spends in the wood workshop as a form of “redemption”.

“Time does not pass in prison. But there, we feel alive and useful,” he said.

In the small dark room with barred windows, Nicolae, a 41-year-old Romanian behind bars since 2013, is busy sawing a piece of wood.

He takes measurements, before carefully carving a violin’s soundboard.

READ ALSO: EXPLAINED: What’s behind Italy’s soaring number of migrant arrivals?

“By building violins… I feel reborn,” he said.

Paring tools, penknives, chisels, saws and small wood planes are lined up on a wall panel, potential weapons which are scrupulously checked back in at the end of the day by the guards.

Standing in front of his workbench, master luthier Enrico Allorto says that he used a method from the 16th century when bending the wood, in order to keep the boat varnish intact.

There is no Stradivarius here. These violins have “a more muted timbre, but they have their charm and reproduce the entire range of sounds”, he says.

“They arouse emotions in the musicians, who in turn transmit them to the public”.

By AFP’s Brigitte HAGEMANN

SHOW COMMENTS