Jane Campion, Laura Poitras, Martin McDonagh Set for Venice Film Festival Jury Duty

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Berlin-based sales agent Pluto Film has boarded “Forever-Forever” (“Nazavzhdy-Nazavzhdy”), Ukrainian filmmaker Anna Buryachkova’s feature directing debut, ahead of its world premiere in Venice Film Festival’s Horizons Extra competition. After transferring from a downtown high school, Tonia (Alina Cheban) befriends a group of badass youngsters, trying to find protection from the people from her past and a place she truly belongs. They spend time together, roaming around Kyiv’s post-socialist suburbs, having fun and getting in trouble.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent An underhanded move by members of Italy’s right-wing government to try and take over the management of Rome’s Centro Sperimentale Film School is prompting an uproar by its students and a strong show of support from the country’s top directors. Earlier this week, students of the Centro Sperimentale — which is the oldest film school in the world, and among the finest — staged a demonstration in front of the country’s parliament just as a piece of legislation that would change the school’s management was swiftly being approved by a parliamentary committee.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent French director Élise Girard’s “Sidonie in Japan” starring Isabelle Huppert as a French writer mourning her husband’s death while on a book tour of Japan, is among titles set to launch from the Venice Film Festival’s independently run Giornate Degli Autori. The section, also known as Venice Days, has unveiled its lineup comprising ten titles world premiering in competition – six of which first works – and films in other sections all displaying a wide range of genres and visual styles, but tied together by “A common discourse,” said the section’s artistic director Gaia Furrer.

Venice parallel section Giornate degli Autori (GdA) has unveiled the selection for its 20th edition running from August 30 to September 9, featuring a surprise short by Céline Sciamma, a new feature by Teona Strugar Mitevska as well as a tribute to late Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée.

Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera is refusing to row back on his decision to invite controversial movie-biz bigwigs Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Luc Besson to the late summer event, which will take place despite the potential disruption by the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. “Luc Besson has been recently fully cleared of any accusations. Woody Allen went under legal scrutiny twice at the end of the ’90s and was absolved,” Barbera said in a new interview with Variety.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Apple TV+ documentary series “Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn” reconstructs the rise and fall of former Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn, whose incarceration in Japan on financial misconduct charges was followed by an extraordinary escape. Inspired by the book “Boundless” by The Wall Street Journal reporters Nick Kostov and Sean McLain, the series is directed by Emmy-winning British filmmaker James Jones (“Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes”).

Refresh for latest…: Venice Film Festival chief Alberto Barbera is announcing the lineup for the event’s 80th edition this morning. We’ll be updating the list as the films are revealed, so check back for more below. You can also watch the livestream here.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The 80th Venice Film Festival is announcing its lineup on Tuesday from the Italian city, where artistic director Alberto Barbera and La Biennale president Roberto Cicutto are holding a press conference. The Lido’s only previously announced titles in the main selection are the opener, Italian director Edoardo De Angelis’ “Comandante” — a lavish anti-war epic featuring local star Pierfrancesco Favino as a heroic Sicilian World War II naval officer — and the closer, Netflix’s survival thriller “Society of the Snow” by Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona. “Comandante” replaced Luca Guadagnino’s sexy sports comedy “Challengers,” starring Zendaya, which had previously been set as the fest’s buzzy opener but was pulled due to promotional complications prompted by the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent “God Is a Woman,” a doc by Swiss-Panamanian filmmaker Andrés Peyrot about Pierre Dominique Gaisseau’s 1975 journey to Panama to make a film on the island-dwelling Kuna people — whose women play a unique and sacred role — will open the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week. The section’s out-of-competition opener reconstructs the legend of this film that was passed down from the elders to the new Kuna generation, but never made it to the screen. Gaisseau, a French explorer and filmmaker who won an Oscar in 1961 for the doc “The Sky Above, the Mud Below,” lived with the Kuna people on a Panamanian island for a year and filmed their most intimate ceremonies. He then promised to return with the film, but never did. He ran out of funding and a bank confiscated his reels, which Peyrot unearthed 50 years later.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s “Society of the Snow,” a reconstruction of a 1972 plane crash in the Andes that forced survivors to take extreme measures, including cannibalism, has been set as the Venice Film Festival’s closing film. The deeply immersive Spanish-language saga is a Netflix original film shot in Andalusia’s Sierra Nevada, mainland Spain’s highest mountain range, using a 300-person crew. “Society of the Snow” will world premiere on the Lido out-of-competition on Sept. 9th. Its official screening will be held in the Palazzo del Cinema after the awards ceremony. In 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which had been chartered to bring Montevideo’s Old Christians Rugby Club team to Chile, crashed at an altitude of 11,712 feet in the Andes.  Of its 45 passengers – which consisted mostly of the rugby team, friends and family – 29 survived. Without food, the survivors, who belonged to Uruguay’s elite, were forced to eat the flesh of the deceased to stay alive. 19 survived an avalanche. 72 days after the crash, 16 finally made it out alive. 

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Recently restored versions of William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “One From the Heart” feature in the Venice Classics section of the 80th Venice Film Festival. The lineup of recently restored films in Venice Classics, which is curated by the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera in collaboration with Federico Gironi, was unveiled on Friday. “The Exorcist” is screened, 50 years after it was produced by Warner Bros., alongside Disney’s “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” starring Shirley Temple and directed by “the prolific and sometimes brilliant” Allan Dwan, to mark the Hollywood studios’ 100th anniversaries.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Tony Vinciquerra, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, took a guarded tone in talking about the SAG-AFTRA strike during an industry panel in Italy on Friday. But it was clear that he hopes it will be over soon. “We are very dismayed about having these strikes” said Vinciquerra, referring to the combined WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that mark the second time in Hollywood history that actors have joined writers on the picket lines. “We want to make a deal,” the Sony chief went on, adding: “Even though there have been a lot of headlines saying the opposite.”

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The 80th Venice Film Festival has revealed its selection of projects for Venice Immersive, the XR-Extended Reality section of the festival, which runs Aug. 30 – Sept. 9. The program will include VR experience “Wallace & Gromit in the Grand Getaway” and a Fatboy Slim project. Venice Immersive is devoted to immersive media and includes all XR means of creative expression: 360° videos and XR works of any length, including installations and virtual worlds. The program, which will take place on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, will present 44 projects from 25 countries, and 24 works in the Worlds Gallery section. It will comprise:

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Venice Film Festival will pay tribute to late Italian icon Gina Lollobrigida, who died in January, with a pre-opening event featuring a double bill of freshly restored works in which she stars. The Lido’s annual pre-opening event on Aug. 29 will feature a 27-minute short by Orson Welles titled “Portrait of Gina.” In 1968, Welles interviewed Lollobrigida in her villa on the Appian Way as the pilot for an ABC TV series — a U.S. version of “Around the World With Orson Welles”– that ABC rejected. Welles’ portrait of the diva remained in the vaults until 1986, when it was screened at the Venice Film Festival one year after Orson Welles’ death. This piece has been defined by Welles as a “personal essay” on Lollobrigida. Interestingly, when Lollobrigida saw “Portrait of Gina” in Venice in 1986, she reportedly tried to have it banned. The short’s restoration was done by the Munich Film Museum and Italy’s Cinecittà.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Seven films have been selected for the 11th edition of Final Cut in Venice, the works-in-progress section of the 80th Venice Film Festival. Final Cut in Venice, which runs Sept. 3-5, provides support for the completion of films from Africa and five Middle Eastern countries: Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. It is one of the programs run by the festival’s industry section, Venice Production Bridge. Over three days, the working copies of the selected films will be presented to producers, buyers, distributors, post-production companies and film festival programmers. The first two days are devoted to screenings, and then one-to-one meetings between the producers of the projects and the professionals attending the Venice Production Bridge will take place on the third day. The program will conclude with the awarding of prizes in kind or in cash, the purpose of which is to provide support for the films’ post-production.

So what film will win the coveted Golden Lion at the 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival this year? Well, there’s no front-runner right now because festival director Albert Barbera hasn’t even anvnounced the in-competition line-up yet. But now we know who will choose the winners alongside jury head Damien Chazelle.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Federico Fellini’s post-war immigration story “Napoli-New York,” which was penned for the big screen by the famed director but never produced, is set to become a graphic novel written by French comic book writer Jean-David Morvan. Meanwhile, as previously announced, cameras are rolling in Naples on the movie version by Oscar-winning director Gabriele Salvatores. Fellini co-wrote the tale with his frequent collaborator Tullio Pinelli, a writer on the Italian maestro’s “La Dolce Vita” and “8 1/2,” as well as other titles. Turin-based media company Arancia Studio has now attached the prolific Morvan – who has written more than 250 books that have sold millions of copies – for the graphic novel adaptation.

The Venice Film Festival has unveiled the names who will join Damien Chazelle on the main Competition jury of its 80th edition, running Aug 30 — Sep 9.

A potential actors strike may be looming, but the 75th Primetime Emmys looks full-steam ahead, for now.