White Material

Showing this weekend at the Venice Film Festival: White Material, directed by Claire Denis

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival's website:

No more smirking. We’re stopping the bullshit right now and staying put. The regular army is preparing to reestablish order in the country. To clean up. To eliminate the rebel officer also known as the Boxeur and rid the countryside of roving child soldiers. All the expatriates have gone home, getting out before things turn nasty. Of the Vials, coffee planters who have lived here for two generations, Maria stands firm. She’s not about to give in to rumors or abandon her harvest at the first sound of gunfire. Just like her father-in-law and her exhusband who is also the father of her son (a little too much of a slacker in her opinion) she is convinced that Cherif, mayor of the neighboring town, will protect them. If she asks him he will save the plantation.

Galileo

Showing at the Venice Film Festival this weekend: Galileo, directed by Liliana Cavani (in 1968)

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival's website:

Galileo Galilei is in Padua where he teaches Physics at the University. This is where Giordano Bruno’s ideas and Copernicus’ principles on the solar system begin to take shape. Through lengthy studies, Galieo becomes convinced that it is the sun, and not the earth that is at the centre of the system of the universe. When summoned to Rome to explain his researches, he is asked by Cardinal Bellarmino and the Pope himself to defer these studies, since his theories border on heresy. It was presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1968.

Clip (with Spanish subtitles):

Insolação

Showing this weekend at the Venice Film Festival: Insolação, directed by Daniela Thomas and Felipe Hirsch

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival's website:

Insolação tells stories of unrequited love. “Love and Loss. Loss, mostly,” says a character. In an empty city, scorched by the sun, the young and old confuse the fever of sunstroke with the delicate birth of passion. Like ghosts, they hover through buildings and endless flatland in search of the ever elusive love. Based loosely on 19th-century Russian short stories, the plots weave and unravel together in the improbable city of Brasilia—a distorted mirror-image of the soviet utopia—located in the heart of the Brazilian desert. Paulo José, the actor whose life is intertwined with the history of Brazilian cinema, plays Andrei, the nostalgic witness of these stories.

Desert Flower

Showing at Venice Film Festival this weekend: Desert Flower, directed by Sherry Hormann

Synopsis from IMDb.com:

Based on the world best-selling book Desert Flower by Waris Dirie - the autobiography of a Somalian nomad circumcised at 5, sold in marriage at 13, who became an American supermodel and is now at the age of 38, the UN spokeswoman against circumcision.

Once Upon a Time Proletarian

Showing this weekend at the Venice Film Festival: Once Upon a Time Proletarian, directed by Xiaolu Guo

Synopsis from Xiaolu's website:

A subjective anatomy of contemporary China in the post Marxist era. With a dark, poetic and existentialist visual mind, the film shows people from different classes living in modern Chinese society.

12 chapters explore facets of Chinese social and political landscape. Stories of yearning, loss and dreams unfold: an old peasant who has lost his land, a millionaire chatting with his mate in a stock exchange office, a young migrant who came to the city to wash cars, a weapon factory worker who wishes Mao was still alive to save the country, a successful hotel owner who praises the government’s liberal economy policies, and young kids whose dream is to become famous western artists…

Lead by metaphoric comical and absurd children stories, each chapter conveys themes of trivial reality, despaired heart, lonesome youth, and uncertain future. This film contemplates a vast and complex society whose citizens are searching for new beliefs and identities after the country’s great revolutionary days, and demonstrates how the individual is conflicting with his time and history.

Via della Croce

Showing this weekend at the Venice Film Festival: Via della Croce, directed by Serena Nono

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival's website:

Via della croce is a film starring the guests of the Hospice at Sant’Alvise in Venice, a facility belonging to the Fondazione partecipazione Casa dell’Ospitalità that offers the homeless accommodation in Mestre and Venice. In the film the stations of the Via Crucis of Jesus Christ are portrayed by tableaux vivants, introduced by the Gospel according to John (from the Gospel according to Mark for the station of the Cyrene) and were filmed outdoors in Venice. The scenes interweave with the testimonies-vie cruces of the guests of Sant’Alvise. The themes of judgment, humiliation, poverty, charity, brotherhood, abandonment, death and resurrection through the voices of those who are hardly ever heard.

Sputnik 5 / Cosmonauta

Showing at the Venice Film Festival this weekend: Sputnik 5 and Cosmonauta, both directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli

Synopsis of Sputnik 5 from the Venice Film Festival's website:

In August 1960 the satellite Korabl- Sputnik 2 was sent into space, better known in the West as Sputnik 5. There were twenty-eight mice, two rats, two dogs, and around a hundred insects aboard. Sputnik 5 tells their tale.

Synopsis of Cosmonauta from the Venice Film Festival's website:

In the early sixties Arturo and Luciana, brother and sister and die-hard passionate communists, follow the progress of the space race together, urging on the Soviet cosmonauts. However as they grow up, the relationship between the two gets a little complicated: Luciana, an aggressive, unconventional adolescent, starts going out with boys and is ashamed of her odd brother, who shows no signs of growing up, possibly because of his epilepsy.

Trailer for Cosmonauta (in Italian, no subtitles):