A number of movies world premiering at the Venice Film Festival may already have distribution deals in place, but the Lido isn’t just a launching pad for blockbusters like “Dune” and other high-profile U.S. studio fare.
Below is a compendium of promising, off-the-radar titles bowing in various Venice sections that are still available for international buyers. The festival runs from Sept. 1-11.
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Amira
Image Credit: Pyramide Egyptian helmer Mohamed Diab, whose claustrophobic Cairo-set “Clash” in 2016 made a splash in Cannes, is in Venice with this timely political drama that takes its cue from real-life instances of Palestinian children conceived behind bars with smuggled sperm. Pic is lead-produced by Mohamed Hefzy’s Cairo-based Film Clinic.
Sales: Pyramide International.
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Costa Brava, Lebanon
Image Credit: Courtesy Abbout Productions Lebanese first-timer Mounia Akl combines her country’s strife and the global climate crisis in this story pairing Oscar-nominated Lebanese star and filmmaker Nadine Labaki (“Capernaum”) and Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri (“The Band’s Visit”) as a couple who has moved from Beirut to live idyllically in the mountains, until one day the government decides to build a garbage landfill right beside their house. Beirut-based Abbout Productions lead-produced. Also in Toronto.
Sales: MK2 Films, Participant Media and Endeavor Content
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Il Buco
Image Credit: Credit: Venice Film Festival Italy’s Michelangelo Frammartino, whose dialogue-free “Le Quattro Volte” made a global splash in 2010, segues with another similarly eclectic pic about a group of speleologists who in 1961 discover Europe’s deepest cave in the pristine Calabrian hinterland. Pic is lensed by ace Swiss cinematographer Renato Berta, whose credits include Louis Malle’s Venice Golden Lion winner “Au revoir les enfants.”
Sales: Coproduction Office
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La Caja (The Box)
Image Credit: Credit: The Match Factory Venezuelan auteur Lorenzo Vigas who won the 2015 Golden Lion with his first feature “From Afar” is back on the Lido with his followup, a drama about a young man from Mexico City who travels to Northern Mexico to collect the remains of his father that have been found in a communal grave. Then, a casual encounter with a man who shares a physical resemblance with his father fills him with doubt. Also in Toronto.
Sales: The Match Factory
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Django and Django: Sergio Corbucci Unchained
Italian pop culture expert Luca Rea weaves a fresh interview with Quentin Tarantino with a treasure trove of material in this portrait of Corbucci, who besides cult 1966 Western “Django” with Franco Nero (also featured), made several other Westerns including “The Great Silence,” starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as a mute gunslinger. The doc is basically on Corbucci’s passion for the Western genre, as explained by Tarantino, his biggest fan.
Sales: True Colours
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Freaks Out
Image Credit: Courtesy Lucky Red Italy’s Gabriele Mainetti, known for hit offbeat 2016 superhero pic “They Call Me Jeeg,” is finally bowing his long-gestating followup, another genre-bender albeit with a bigger budget. The elegant effects-laden pic is set in 1943 Rome where four “freaks” who work in a circus are left to their own devices when the Eternal City is bombed by Allied Forces. Venice chief Alberto Barbera has said it has echoes of Federico Fellini and Sergio Leone, while also being very personal and original. True Colours is in charge of festival distribution.
Sales: RAI Com
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Three Minutes - A Lengthening
Image Credit: Credit: US Holocaust Memorial Museum A home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938 in a Jewish town in Poland. Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, the three minutes of footage are believed to be the only moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust. The footage, edited to create a film that lasts more than an hour, is intertwined with interviews with Glenn Kurtz, grandson of David Kurtz, and Maurice Chandler, who appears in the film as a boy.
Sales: Autlook Filmsales
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Madeleine Collins
Image Credit: Credit: Laurent Thurin-Nal A psychological drama headlined by Virginie Efira, the star of Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta” who sits on Venice’s competition jury this year. In the film, directed by Antoine Barraud, Efira stars as Judith, who leads a double life between Switzerland and France with two different men, and gets slowly embroiled in a web of lies and secrets, leading her balancing act to explode dangerously. The movie also stars Nadav Lapid, the Israeli helmer of Cannes-prizewinning “Ahed’s Knee.”
Sales: Charades
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True Things
Image Credit: Courtesy of True Things Film Ltd/Chris Harris Directed by Harry Wootliff, the film is a psychological drama headlined by “The Affair” star Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke (“The Souvenir”). Wilson portrays a woman struggling to find her own voice whose destructive sexual relationship with a charismatic stranger (Burke) awakens her. The film is an adaptation of Deborah Kay Davies’ book “True Things About Me,” based on a script by Wootliff and Molly Davies.
Sales: The Bureau Sales
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Out of Sync
Image Credit: Credit: Álvaro Mascarell Spanish actor Marta Nieto plays a talented and passionate sound designer who realizes, after delivering a few sound mixes with clear defects of synchronization, that her brain is processing sound later than images. As the time lapse extends, day after day, she will face hardships, be forced to give up her job and reconsider her whole life. “Out of Sync” is directed by Spanish helmer Juanjo Giménez, whose last short film “Timecode” won Cannes’ Palme d’Or for best short and was nominated for an Oscar in 2017.
Sales: Le Pacte
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You Resemble Me
Image Credit: Courtesy You Resemble Me The directorial debut of Dina Amer, an Egyptian-born, New York-based award-winning filmmaker and journalist who has worked on stories about human trafficking of Syrian refugees and explored the underground economy of illegal Egypt-Gaza tunnels. Executive produced by Spike Lee, Spike Jonze and Alma Har’el, the thought-provoking film is set on the outskirts of Paris and follows two sisters who have been torn apart. One of them, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading her to make a choice that shocks the world.
Sales: Match Factory