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The 77th festival promises to be a milestone in the reopening of the film industry, even with a reduced schedule, distance measurements and new screening sites.
By Eleanor Stanford
LONDON – The Venice Film Festival on Tuesday announced the program of its 77th edition, establishing precautions, adding temperature controls and new screening sites for what will be one of the first primary foreign festivals held since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
This year will run from 2 to 12 September, with a reduced schedule. Sixty films will be screened in official selection, up from 80 last year.
“The exhibition will have to continue and the global will have to continue,” said Roberto Cicutto, president of La Biennale di Venezia, who runs the festival, in a phone interview, adding that it was vital to “see and talk about movies together. , to live this art as we live it.
The films competing for the first prize of the festival, the Golden Lion, come with Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland”, produced through Frances McDormand and starring Frances McDormand as a nomadic woman after the recent recession; “The World to Come” through Mona Fastvold, with Vanessa Kirthrough and Casey Affleck, explores the love between two farmers in the 19th-century America; and “Pieces of a Woman”, a family drama circle directed by Kornel Mundruczo and starring Shia LaBeouf.
The screening in the festival’s documentary segment will be “Crazy, Not Insane,” a look at director Alex Gibney’s serial killers, such as “Salvatore Ferragamo: The Shoemaker of Dreams,” a documentary directed through Luca Guadagnino, and “City Hall” through Frederick Wiseman, a look at the Boston Administrative Center.
Although the Shanghai International Film Festival took place in July, the pandemic forced the cancellation or maximum postponement of the talks that historically mark the year of filmmakers in Hollywood and the West, adding Cannes and the Tribeca Film Festival.
At the end of March, Italy was the global epicentre of the pandemic and the country was blocked for 3 months. Meanwhile, Venice was empty of its very crowd of visitors and some locals rejoiced. Italy began lifting restrictions last month.
To comply with Italian estrangement rules, the festival will keep at least part of the empty seats in its screening rooms and review visitors with temperature controls upon entering the festival spaces and during their screenings. The social estrangement will be in place the festival and mask will be used.
Films of the official variety of the festival will be screened more of the same old ones, either in the same ancient theatres of the festival (including the Palazzo del Cinema and Palazzo del Casin) or outdoors, on the site of an ice rink and inside the Giardini. della Biennale, the festival gardens.
“We are able to face this scenario and do it safely, protecting people,” Cicutto said.
The festival will screen films from more than 50 countries, and of the 18 films competing for the Golden Lion, 8 are directed through women. This year, Cate Blanchett is the jury president of the main festival and director Claire Denis will lead the jury of the festival’s Horizons festival.
The festival will award lifetime prizes to Tilda Swinton and filmmaker Ann Hui.
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