Ava DuVernay Was Once Told Not To Apply To Venice Film Festival: ‘You Won’t Get In’

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor “Poor Things” can win things. That’s a nugget of information we gleaned at the conclusion of Venice, Telluride and Toronto, the three major fall festivals. For starters, Yorgos Lanthimos’ sci-fi dramedy collected the Golden Lion at Venice.

Holly rings her school to tell them she is staying at home. She isn’t sick. She just can’t bring herself to go. “Bad things are going to happen today,” she says just above a whisper, her voice cracking.

It’s interesting how the Venice Film Festival has gone from one of the festivals of the fall festival season to arguably the best film festival in the world now, even overshadowing Cannes in recent years thanks to the fact that Netflix now avoids the Croisette for the most part because of France’s theatrical laws and save their Oscar contenders for the Lido. Venice has had an amazing run, arguably since 2017 when Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape Of Water” won the top prize and then went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, which has happened one more time since with “Nomadland” and several key Oscar contenders since).

Ben Croll Seated before a photo of filmmaker Sarah Moldoror, panelists at this year’s Women in Film roundtable shared strategies for greater industry parity, while reflecting on recent successes and standstills in that ongoing pursuit. Variety has been give access to the video of the panel discussion.

Ava DuVernay touched down at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday evening with her new film Origin, which world premiered in Competition and received a more than eight-minute ovation in its debut screening.

Ellise Shafer Ava DuVernay’s latest film, “Origin,” premiered in competition at Venice Film Festival to a 5 minute and 46 second standing ovation. Based on Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” “Origin” chronicles “the remarkable life and work” of Wilkerson “as she investigates the genesis of injustice and uncovers a hidden truth that affects us all,” according to the film’s synopsis. The drama stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Niecy Nash-Betts, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood, Connie Nielsen, Emily Yancy, Jasmine Cephas-Jones, Finn Wittock, Victoria Pedretti, Isha Blaaker and Myles Frost.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In “Origin,” Ava DuVernay weaves a centuries- and continents-spanning narrative feature around the ideas of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson, who rejects the word “racism.” It’s not that she doesn’t believe that racism exists; rather, she doesn’t think that racism alone can explain the inequity in human society — the way America’s founders could have written “all men are created equal” and meant something so different. As Isabel Wilkerson, the protagonist (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who is based on Isabel Wilkerson, the author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” puts it to her editor (Blair Underwood), “Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient.” And later, to her sister (Niecy Nash-Betts): “We have to consider oppression in a way that does not centralize race.” The book “Caste” was Wilkerson’s answer to that challenge, drawing connections between discrimination in the United States and how Nazi Germany invented a social hierarchy to justify the Holocaust, which she links in turn to the rigid system of caste in India.

Not so much beginners as people who never get a fair go, the mixed bag of gay men and women in Australian-Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping For Beginners, showing in Venice’s Horizons section, lives on a knife’s edge. Dita (Anamaria Marinca) owns the house where they jostle along together. Her Roma partner Suada (Alina Serban) has a teenage daughter Vanesa and another daughter, Mia, who is only five. Suada is volatile, belligerent and dying of cancer. Death is focusing her mind in alarming ways. Swear to look after the children, she shouts at Dita, holding a knife over her own arm.

Ava DuVernay is making history today. In Venice with Origin, which world premieres in the Sala Grande this evening, she is the first African American female filmmaker to ever have been selected in competition at the world’s oldest festival. DuVernay earlier told Deadline’s Dominic Patten, “Venice was a big goal. It feels like a real full-circle moment.”

“That is the part where you look up and you say, ‘how could people have allowed their neighbors to be taken and put in the camps?’” says Origin director Ava DuVernay of the deep roots of discrimination and the cruel consequences of subjugation.

Richard Linklater brought his Hit Man to the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, world premiering the comedy thriller out of competition to a six-minute ovation inside the Sala Grande.

The tears flowed for Priscilla Presley following the world premiere of Sofia Coppola’s biopic, “Priscilla”, in Venice on Monday.

“I feel like there’s a sort of mouth over the city, ready to eat us up,” says Enea, sophisticated young nightclubber, tennis champion and coke dealer; if anyone is trying to swallow the Eternal City whole, it’s Enea himself. The son of intellectuals – his mother hosts a television chat show about literature; his father is a psychoanalyst – the inexhaustible Enea scoots and toots between the city’s most exclusive sports club, the city’s most exclusive parties and, even more thrillingly, rendezvous with the criminal classes, homespun proletarians to a man. “You need to marry Eva, have a child with her, make her happy. If you have no one to kiss, you go crazy,” advises Giordano (Adamo Dionisi), pusher and family man, when he learns that playboy Enea has acquired a girlfriend. Whatever. In his line of work and with the company he keeps, Giordano isn’t going to last that long.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Neon has acquired worldwide rights to Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” ahead of its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The movie, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, will also screen at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Origin” will be released in theaters later this year.

Neon has acquired worldwide rights for Ava DuVernay’s Origin ahead of its world premiere in Competition at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday (September 6).

Ellise Shafer While receiving amfAR’s Award of Inspiration at the AIDS nonprofit’s Venice gala on Sunday night, Ava DuVernay recalled the first time she fell in love with movies. “It was the original ‘West Side Story,'” DuVernay said.

Ava DuVernay’s Origin, the first film by an African American woman to play in Competition at the Venice Film Festival, will have a Gala screening at Roy Thomson Hall at TIFF on Monday, September 11. DuVernay will be in attendance for the screening of the film, which she wrote, produced and directed.

The plan was for renowned director William Friedkin to be appearing at the Venice Film Festival presenting the out of competition World Premiere of his latest production, an adaptation of Herman Wouk’s 1954 play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Unfortunately Friedkin died August 7th, but the show goes on anyway.

Gabriel Guevara has been arrested.

In principle, using the rainy-day, kitchen-sink post-rock of Manchester band The Smiths so prominently in a film like The Killer seems incredibly perverse, given that it’s an exotic, globe-trotting thriller about an American assassin. But in reality, it’s actually very sound choice indeed: legend has it that the band’s singer, Morrissey, had two reasons for naming his band so, the first being that “Smith” is one of the most common and thus unremarkable surnames in the world. The second, and much more subversive theory, suggests that it’s also a reference to David and Maureen Smith, brother-in-law and sister of ’60s serial killer Myra Hindley, the snappily dressed couple whose testimony blew open the Moors Murderers case and whose beatnik likenesses adorn the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album “Goo”.