2023-09-09 20:01:58
Strong political message
In an Italy ruled by the extreme right, the jury chaired by Damien Chazelle (La-la-land, First Man) also sent a political message by awarding several prizes to films denouncing the fate reserved for migrants by Europe. A great voice of Polish cinema, Agnieszka Holland received the special jury prize for Green Borderwhich shows the tragic fate of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa, tossed between Poland and Belarus in 2021, prisoners of a diplomatic game that goes beyond them.
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A young Senegalese actor, Seydou Sarr, received the Best Newcomer prize for his role as a young migrant who crosses Africa and the Mediterranean at the risk of his life to reach Italy, in Me, Captain by Matteo Garrone, a film which also won the Silver Lion for best direction.
Artificial intelligence
As for performers, the Mostra distinguished two Americans: Cailee Spaeny, 25, for her first major role, that of the wife of the “King”, Priscilla Presley, in the biopic Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, and Peter Sarsgaard, who plays Jessica Chastain, as a man suffering from dementia, in Memory by Michel Franco. Unlike many stars playing in films from major studios, and who were unable to make the trip to Venice in the midst of a strike, the two winners went on stage to receive their trophies.
Peter Sarsgaard took the opportunity to express his support for the strike and launch a diatribe against artificial intelligence, for which screenwriters and actors are demanding supervision. “If we lose this battle, our industry will only be the first of many others to fall,” he prophesied: medicine or the conduct of war could in turn be entrusted to artificial intelligence, which would “opens the way to atrocities”.
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The Mostra was the first international festival hit hard by the historic standoff with the studios, even if a few stars like Adam Driver, Mads Mikkelsen and Jessica Chastain came, each taking care to provide their support to the strikers.
Feminist collages in Venice
Union demands were not the only ones trying to be heard in Venice. Feminist movements also sought to give voice, notably through collages in the city to denounce the honors granted by the oldest film festival in the world to artists targeted by the movement. #MeToo, which denounces sexist and sexual violence against women. Luc Besson, against whom rape charges were brought before being definitively dismissed by French justice this year, was in competition with Dogman.
Woody Allen, banned from the American film industry but not prosecuted, presented his 50th film Stroke of luck, the first filmed in French, out of competition. Roman Polanski, who has been fleeing American justice for more than 40 years after a conviction for sexual relations with a minor, did not travel to Venice, where his latest film The Palace, also out of competition, received a cold reception. The director of the Mostra, Alberto Barbera, justified the invitation of these three filmmakers by calling for a distinction between the man and the artist.
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