Per Questi Stretti Morire (Cartografia de una Passione)

At the Venice Film Festival: Per Questi Stretti Morire (Cartografia de una Passione), directed by Isabella Sandri and Giuseppe Gaudrino

Synopsis from the festival's website:

The perseverance, excess and suffering in the life and works of the explorer, filmmaker and photographer Alberto Maria De Agostini (1883-1960) are arbitrarily reinvented. Having left his village in Piemonte at the age of 26 to become a missionary, he reached Patagonia and the Tierra del Fuego in 1910. He scaled mountains, discovered fjords and explored glaciers, naming them all. On encountering the anguish and pain of the destruction of the last Indio natives, he expressed these feelings eloquently through the photo plates and frames of his beautiful film Terre Magellaniche. All of this ends up as an imaginary and chaotic repository of memories, amongst the sad, hoarded remains of “white civilization.”

La belle endormie

At the Venice International Film Festival: La belle endormie, directed by Catherine Breillat

I really liked her Bluebeard, so I'm curious to see what Breillat does with a slightly less weird fairy tale. Although I've heard that earlier versions of Sleeping Beauty had the princess awakening from the suckling of the baby that was conceived and born while she was in her coma. That makes it weirder.

Synopsis from the festival's website:

Once upon a time... In a castle somewhere in a bygone age... The fairy Carabosse cuts the umbilical cord of a newborn babe, a little girl called Anastasia. Three young scatterbrained fairies appear, their cheeks red from running... Too late, says Carabosse, at sixteen the child’s hand will be pierced and she’ll die.

The young fairies burst into tears! Their tardiness didn’t deserve that. Now they must ward off the fatal curse... They just manage to predict that instead of dying, Anastasia will fall asleep for 100 years.

Sleeping for a century is very boring, so they bestow on her the possibility of wandering far and wide in her dreams during those 100 years of sleep...

Somewhere

At the Venice International Film Festival: Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola

Synopsis from the festival's website:

You have probably seen him in the tabloids: Johnny Marco drives around in a Ferrari and has a constant stream of girls and pills when he feels like having a night in. Comfortably numbed, Johnny drifts along. Then, his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) from his failed marriage arrives unexpectedly at the Chateau Hotel and he is forced to confront his life.

This film won the Golden Lion, which means that Coppola basically won the whole festival. Huzzah!

Attenberg

At the Venice International Film Festival: Attenberg, directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari

Synopsis from the festival's website:

Marina, a twenty-three year-old girl, lives with her architect father in a prototype factory town by the sea. Finding the human species strange and repellent, she keeps her distance. Instead she stubbornly observes it through songs of suicide, the mammal documentaries of Sir David Attenborough and the sex education lessons she receives from her only friend, Bella. A stranger comes to town and challenges her to a table football duel, on her own table. Meanwhile, her father ritualistically prepares for his exit from the 20th century, which he considers to be “overrated.” Caught between the two men and her collaborator Bella, Marina investigates the wondrous mystery of human fauna.

Meek's Cutoff

At the Venice International Film Festival*: Meek's Cutoff, directed by Kelly Reichardt

Synopsis from the festival's website:

The year is 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, and a wagon team of three families has hired the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a short cut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high desert plain, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the ensuing days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in each other’s instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as the natural enemy.

*And yes, I realize the festival is over, but somehow I don't think any of us actually went, so the end result is basically the same, right?

Ragazze – La vita trema

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Ragazze – La vita trema, directed by Paola Sangiovanni

Synopsis from the Venice Days’ website:

Alessandra, Maria Paola, Marina and Liliana come from different geographical, cultural and social milieu and their lives crossed or just grazed each other in Rome between the end of the 1960s and the 1970s. Their stories, told in first person today, are rounded out by vivid and present images from public and private archives. It is a subjective telling. The “starting with one’s self,” which formulated spontaneously during the feminist movement and set the foundation for a new political practice, today becomes historical narrative. The idea of a new world – in which there would be no violence or bullying of one person by another – bloomed simultaneously in the breasts of nearly an entire generation throughout the country. Thus, the film unfolds along the parallel track of women’s history as well, touching upon the consciousness of one’s self as a woman, self-consciousness, love, violence against women, divorce, contraception, abortion, work, theatre, free radios, squatting, the displacement of personal experiences into collective ones for a more humane world, of women and men, girls and boys.

You can watch a trailer here.

Ruzhaye sabz (Green Days)

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Ruzhaye sabz (Green Days), directed by Hana Makhmalbaf

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival’s website:

Ava is a depressed Iranian Girl. She goes to psychologist for treatment. She sees past political incident in Iran as the cause of her depression. The psychologist advises her to do some labor work like cleaning the staircases and even asks her to work on a play. However, her play, which is inspired by reality and problems in her society, gets banned. Suddenly people get their hopes together and come out to street and decide to participate in the election to vote against the current president. But Ava still doesn’t believe change will come. She goes out and starts to talk to people in street trying to regain her hopes back...

Daimon / Cock-Crow

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Daimon and Cock-Crow, directed by David Zamagni and Nadia Ranocchi

Synopses (of a sort) from the Venice Film Festival’s website:

Daimon

Daimon is a sort of filmed screenplay for a visionary imaginary biography of Georges Bataille. Daimon is an invitation to open your eyes to the point of nausea, to consider eroticism gravely and tragically. Eros is the daimon par excellence, but the term does not simply indicate a divine figure, its etymon evokes the lacerator, the one who divides and breaks up. The leitmotiv of Daimon is therefore tension, a conflict impossible to resolve which is intrinsic to human nature, insoluble nature as the source of glory and ecstasy, of laughter and tears. Eroticism, sacrifice, joy, horror and death are the elements that determine the division of Daimon into sequences. The sum belongs to the sphere of the impossible.

Cock-Crow

Every era generates and cultivates its dragon. Mysterious unknown powers that determine the simplest everyday gestures of a humanity deprived of any natural quality, men for whom their own bodily existence becomes a ruthless battlefield. A depth that is impossible to gauge and therefore admitted to participate in the economy of the sacred. Cock-Crow materializes the dreams of a boy who is guilty of what he sees. It is the fall into an anterior world, a place of non-consolatory object-images.

Wahed-Sefr (One-Zero)

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Wahed-Sefr (One-Zero), directed by Abou Zekri Kamla

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival’s website:

Today is the final of the African Nations Cup 2008. And today eight characters will be dealing with different situations, which further complicate their already complicated lives. But the victory of the Egyptian team makes them forget their problems, even if only for one night, the night their team won by “One-Zero.”

Trailer (without subtitles):

Deserto Rosa – Luigi Ghirri

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Deserto Rosa – Luigi Ghirri, directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi

Synopsis from Sgarbi’s website:

Accostarsi alle fonti dell'emozione, criterio-guida fondamentale di tutta l'opera del grande fotografo Luigi Ghirri: questo è l'obiettivo del film. L'estremo progetto di Luigi Ghirri, purtroppo non realizzato, era una "casa delle stagioni": acquistare un casolare, che compare nelle ultime opere del fotografo, nei pressi della sua casa di Roncocesi, e allestirvi mostre legate, ciascuna, alla stagione corrente, in modo da creare una stretta relazione tra tempo naturale e tempo dell'arte.

A questo progetto interrotto si ispira Deserto rosa, in cui la telecamera 'visita' una serie di paesaggi fotografati da Ghirri appunto secondo l'alternarsi delle stagioni: Primavera, Estate, Autunno, Inverno e Primavera notturna.

Aleksandr Sokurov racconta ciascuna stagione rappresentata nel film, focalizzando in forma narrativa la il sentimento della ciclicità del tempo di Luigi Ghirri.
Paola Borgonzoni Ghirri lo ha così raccontato "Luigi Ghirri era sempre là, sospeso su quella fune sopra a un campo innevato, sulla terra arata o confuso nella nebbia, sempre un po' più in alto di me anche sulle spiagge dell'Adriatico nella luce del tramonto estivo che regala a questo mare il turchese e lo smeraldo."


Hmm. The Venice Film Festival's website also includes an English version:

The purpose of the film is to approach to the sources of emotion, which is the essential guide-line of the great photographer Luigi Ghirri’s whole work. Luigi Ghirri’s ultimate project, which unfortunately has not been realized, was a “house of seasons”: he planned to buy a cottage— appearing in his last works—near his house in Roncocesi, with the aim of using it as a space for the staging of a series of exhibitions, each related to the going season, in order to establish a relation between the time of nature and the time of Art. Deserto Rosa is inspired by this interrupted project: the camera “pays visit” to a sequence of landscapes photographed by Ghirri just following the season rotation: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Night Spring. Aleksandr Sokurov describes every season represented in the movie, focusing in a narrative form the feeling of time blindness that belonged to Luigi Ghirri. Paola Borgonzoni Ghirri described him as follows: “Luigi Ghirri was always there, walking on a rope over a snowy meadow, on a ploughed field or vanishing in the fog, always a little higher than me even on the Adriatic beaches, in the light of one of those summer sunsets, that give this sea his hues of turquoise and emerald.”

Poesia che mi guardi

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Poesia che mi guardi, directed by Marina Spada

Synopsis from the website for Venice Days:

Beginning with Antonia Pozzi, an original and passionate Italian poet of the 20th century, who killed herself at the tender age of 26 in 1938, Poesia che mi guardi reflects upon the role of the artist and poet in society, then and now. The film gives voice to her poetry and her tormented existential search, her wariness towards men, who dismissed her poetic talent as an emotional disorder, and towards her social environment, Milan’s upper class, which kept her from living her life with sincerity and passion. The driving force and narrator of the film is Maria, a filmmaker who, fascinated with Pozzi, studies and her work and researches the world and people of her life. A decisive moment for Maria comes when she meets a group of university students who write their poems anonymously on walls around Milan, convinced that in our lives there is always a great need for poetry. Maria involves them in her project: she wants Antonia Pozzi’s poetry to be revived in Milan through the students, no longer as a solitary and intimate expression, but as a shared moment. She wants this action to redeem Antonia Pozzi, to give her the recognition and visibility denied her when she was alive.

Listicky (Foxes)

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Listicky (Foxes), directed by Mira Fornay

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival’s website:

Alzbeta and Martina are two sisters who have immigrated to Ireland. When Alzbeta decides to live with Ducky, a drifter she has just met, Martina, in a relationship with an Irishman, tries to keep her out of trouble. But Alzbeta cannot help clashing with her sister because of a tragic event in their past.

Trailer (without subtitles):

Vittorio D

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Vittorio D, directed by Mario Canale & Annarosa Morri

Synopsis from a related IndieWire article:

Seventy years after his first film (Red Roses, 1939) and 35 after his death, Vittorio De Sica remains a celebrated, forgotten and perhaps unknown giant of Italian cinema. His irrepressible humanity, versatility as an actor and intransigence as a filmmaker remain in the shadows. This original and different portrait is created through stories from De Sica’s children — Emy, Christian and Manuel — alongside artists such as Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, John Landis, Ken Loach and Mario Monicelli.

Zanan Bedoone Mardan (Women Without Men)

Showing at Venice Film Festival today: Zanan Bedoone Mardan (Women Without Men), directed by Shirin Neshat

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival’s website:

Against the tumultuous backdrop of Iran’s 1953 CIA-backed coup d’état, the destinies of four women converge in a beautiful orchard garden, where they find independence, solace and companionship. Acclaimed video artist Shirin Neshat makes her directorial debut with this incisive reflection on the pivotal moment in history that directly led to the Islamic revolution and the Iran we know today.




And here’s a song for Ms. Neshat:

Lo spazio bianco

Showing at Venice Film Festival today: Lo spazio bianco, directed by Francesca Comencini

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival’s website:

Maria is waiting for a little girl; she is no longer pregnant but is waiting anyway. She is waiting for her daughter to be born or to die. If there is one thing Maria is unable to do, it is to wait. This is why these three months that she has to face, alone, waiting for her daughter Irene to come out of the incubator, have caught her unawares. Used to relying exclusively on herself and taking all decisions by herself, Maria forces herself into a passive state of apnea, excluding the whole world and imprisoning herself in the white space of waiting. However, this effort at painful isolation consumes the last ounce of strength she has: The bubble of isolation Maria has closed herself in is put to the test and finally explodes. Maria has to save herself if she is to save the child.

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.

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.

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):