Five Italian films compete for the Golden Lion top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, running September 2–12. Nanni Moretti is back in competition after 37 years, alongside stories of love, ghosts and horror.
An Italian quintet of films, led by the long-awaited competition return of cult director and former Cannes winner Nanni Moretti, will bring love, ghosts and horror to this year’s Venice Film Festival as they vie for the Golden Lion between September 2 and 12.
Moretti’s return after 37 years
The 83rd edition of the festival marks the “prodigal son” comeback of Moretti, who returns to competition after 37 years with “Succederà questa notte” (“It Will Happen Tonight”). His last appearance in the running for the Golden Lion ended controversially in 1989, when “Palombella Rossa” (“Red Wood Pigeon”) was excluded.
This time, far removed from any political dimension, the Roman director brings to the Lido a film freely adapted from several short stories in Eshkol Nevo’s collection “Legami” (“Ties That Bind”). At its heart is the relationship between Greta and Matteo, played by Jasmine Trinca and Louis Garrel, two people who keep meeting at the wrong moment.
Four more Italians in the running
Moretti is joined in competition by four other Italian directors.
Marcho Bechis
Marco Bechis presents “Ritorno a Buenos Aires” (“Return to Buenos Aires”), revisiting, thirty years on, the territory of his acclaimed “Garage Olimpo.” Its protagonist, played by Adriano Giannini, is a former internee summoned back to the Argentine capital to testify at the trial of the former soldiers who kidnapped, tortured and enslaved him during the military dictatorship — a journey back into a past of remembered and relived nightmares.
Edoardo de Angelis
Edoardo De Angelis brings “Il fuoco che ti porta dentro” (“The Fire You Carry Inside”), based on the novel by Antonio Franchino, which transposes Eduardo De Filippo’s famous 1931 tragicomedy “Natale in casa Cupiello” into a contemporary, “3.0” setting: the bourgeois Milanese home of Antonio (Lino Musella), a politically correct editor. Vanessa Scalera plays his mother, in what festival artistic director Alberto Barbera has described as a portrait at once ruthless and comic of a possessive, hostile mother — a distillation of the Neapolitan essence her children had tried to escape by moving north.
Andrea Pallaoro
Andrea Pallaoro’s “The Echo Chamber,” drawn from the late Bernardo Bertolucci’s final, unproduced screenplay, shares a Toronto Film Festival selection with Moretti’s own film. Conceived by Bertolucci as both an apartment drama and a “ghost story,” it follows Leo (Luca Marinelli), a troubled, cocaine-addicted music producer and unresolved artist, and Anne (Alicia Vikander), the young physiotherapist who heals both his back and, through her love, his anguish. Susan Sarandon rounds out the cast as Ava, a major songwriting star drawn to the apartment for an unexpected final album.
Paolo Strippoli
Rounding out Italy’s competition slate is 33-year-old Paolo Strippoli with “L’estranea” (“The Stranger”), a “soft horror” film centred on a mother (Jasmine Trinca) who reveals to her daughter (Romana Maggiora Vergano) that she knows nothing of her own family’s past — behind it all lies a woman, the titular Stranger, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi with just the right note of devilish charm. Without relying on special effects, the film underscores a familiar truth: everyday life often harbours a horror all its own, worthy of the genre’s great classics.
