“Al-Sharq Al-Awsat” at the Venice Film Festival: The high demand for viewing refutes expectations
In its 80th session, held between August 30 and September 9, the Venice Film Festival announced a significant jump in film screenings in the first half of the session, in relation to the number of viewers among ticket buyers.
To note, there are two types of attendees: those invited to watch with free tickets (filmmakers, journalists, and critics), and movie lovers from the general public, who must purchase tickets.
According to the advertiser, the number of tickets sold increased by 9 percent compared to last year, as the number of buyers reached 35,375 people. As for the turnout of those with free tickets, the increase amounted to 17 percent compared to last year.
Combining the free tickets for professionals and those sold to the general public, the total number is 114,851 people, an increase of 18 percent from last year’s total. These numbers are not final, but stop at the seventh day of the ancient Italian festival.
This, as the festival officials themselves admitted when three of them were asked, was not expected. This is because the Hollywood strike spread a kind of warning to the festival before it was held, stating that there is no expectation of great interest in this year’s edition from its regular visitors, namely critics and media professionals, nor from the audience who are accustomed to using the occasion to follow a rich panorama of new films and some classics.
One party supports and one party pretends
The current success has eliminated those fears, but it is also an occasion to draw Hollywood’s attention to the fact that international festivals (especially the three main ones; Berlin, Cannes, and Venice) cannot be ignored in terms of encouraging the industry and moving its wheels forward. The festival issued a statement in which it said that it hopes for a satisfactory end for all parties regarding the strike of actors and writers. The statement was not neutral, but rather a poke at the studios that refrained from responding to the strikers’ demand to increase their wages and protect their future against technological deductions that would harm actors (through cloning) and writers (through reliance on scenarios produced by these technologies without human effort).
The poke came at the end of the statement, when he said: “The festival represents an act of respect and support for the striking artists and authors (especially) those who attended the festival.”
Directors and some actors stated their support for the strike and that they want the two unions (actors and writers) to insist on achieving the goals they presented to the studios. In Hollywood, talks are now frozen after the final round in the last week of last month.
In addition, the reception of Woody Allen’s film “A Reversal of Fortune” two days ago, when it was presented at the evening ceremony, witnessed a great welcome from the festival’s president, Alberto Barbera, in exchange for a women’s demonstration against the director, led by women who wanted to express their voices opposing his reception due to sexual charges that were acquitted by the American court. Of which.
This position was expected, and will not change anything in the course of the festival. Woody Allen will spend most of the next year searching for an independent financier, his condition for survival. In an interview with Variety magazine a few days ago, he said: “This movie (A Reversal of Fortune) is my fiftieth movie, and after that I don’t know. I may stop at this point regarding films because searching for financing has become more difficult than before. It requires an exceptional and great effort in such circumstances. If I found an independent funder, I thought I would continue; But not before that.”
As for Roman Polanski, the man will not be able to return to the Venice Film Festival for two or three years if he in turn wants to continue – he said that his new film, “The Palace”, is his last film – this places the French director Luc Besson, who screened “Dogman” among Current session competition, in the foreground. He is able to work at a fast pace, but it will have to be faster than usual if he wants to participate in the next session, which is unlikely.
Of the three films, “Dogman” received the most critical acclaim. A “reversal of fortune” came second, and “The Palace” came last. But the wheel of performances does not stop at the opinions of the public or professionals, amid films that exceed the three works mentioned.
The story of Ron who is Gary
One of the wonderful films seen here over the past two days is “Thumper” by director Richard Linklater, who usually makes his films as an independent author and most of them receive praise from critics and specialized audiences.
This time, he deviated from the path of independence, even in principle. His film is like a jazz piece whose keys vary and its melodies move from comedy to detective, without diminishing the level of its satirical presence. On the other hand, it is an example of a modern “noir” film, if not because of its atmosphere (and some quick shots from previous “noir” films), then because the theme follows the theme of most of that type of police films and dramas.
We meet Gary (Glen Powell), who gives his lectures at the university about the individual and society from a philosophical perspective. He is skilled and knows what he is talking about and how to make his lectures entertaining and useful. We will notice that the number of his students increased at the end of the film, and all the seats were full and interested in what he had to say.
Gary has another job: he helps eavesdrop and draw pictures of characters who each intend to carry out a crime. We are still at the beginning of the film when Gary is nominated for the role of “Hit Man,” who (under a different name and a different personality) will meet anyone who calls him to carry out a murder. He will listen to him. He will promise to fulfill his request in exchange for the agreed upon amount and will complete the task as soon as possible. All of this is heard by a team of assistants, and as soon as Gary (whose name is now Ron) leaves, the team storms the place to arrest the man who they believed had hired a killer to carry out his crime.
Among them is a married woman named Madison (Adria Arjona, who looks like a young Salma Hayek), who wants Ron to kill her husband because he is violent. Instead of agreeing with her, he then sees her in handcuffs and being taken to the police station, and then to the court; He convinces her not to think about this plan, to file for divorce, and to enjoy a private life away from her husband. While this angers Gary/Ron’s officials, the woman feels attracted to his personality and he quickly admires her again, so they embark on a romantic relationship after her divorce from her husband.
Here the theme of the film “Noir” comes into play. The woman in these films is a tool to destroy the male hero. You may betray him, you may drive him to moral or financial bankruptcy, or you may try to kill him. In the movie “A Broken Breath” (the first film by Frenchman Jean-Luc Godard), a phrase said by Jean-Paul Belmondo states that the woman a man falls in love with is the woman who destroys him. This is what happens here, with the difference that the story will depict the two of them having defrauded the law (after actually killing her ex-husband), and now they are getting married and having a child.
Migrants between two hells
180 degrees away, there is a serious and painful film by Polish director Agnieszka Holland that mimics the suffering of illegal immigrants in the West. Films dealing with this topic have multiplied in the last ten years due to the continuing migration across North Africa, which followed the beginning of the war in Syria. But “Green Borders,” funded by five private European companies (Poland, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, and Belgium), exceeds most of them in the size of the presence of reality in it, and in its depth in depicting the brutality of the police towards those fleeing from the hell of war to another hell that they did not expect.
The film (divided into 5 parts) begins with a chapter entitled “The Family,” about a Syrian family consisting of the grandfather, his son, the daughter-in-law, and his three children. They communicate with one of their relatives in Sweden, who expects them to pass from Belarusian territory to Polish territory, and from there to Sweden. But none of this went as expected.
The arrival of the family (including a Muslim woman, but not Arab) to the border between Belarus and Poland coincided with the start of brutal beatings by police on both sides. The family and other oppressed people find themselves sometimes in Belarus and sometimes in Poland. The first party denies it after multiplying to the second, and the second denies it after multiplying to the first.
Meanwhile, several tragedies occur: the family loses a child who drowned in a swamp, the grandfather is separated from the family (we do not see him again). The wife loses her child during childbirth.
Veteran director Holland alternately relays what happens to the family and the quest of women in the surrounding countryside to help them as much as possible. They succeed sometimes and fail at other times, but they insist on helping those who remain among them to seek refuge in Sweden after all this misery.
The film, in black and white, almost escapes the hands of its director in the middle area, where there is some repetition, but what saves it is its honesty, realism, and sincere desire to present the situation as it is, even though it is an author film, not adapted from a real incident, even if what is narrated is deduced from facts.
Little-known Arab actors crown this effort: Bahia Attia, Jalal Al-Taweel, Nadim Suleiman and Dalia Naous. One can imagine the difficulty of these people moving from their situations to embodying the bitterness experienced by their characters.
