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Most sites just give you a list of film titles but we always aim to provide you with more information which is one of the (several) reasons we're slower with the news! Over 50% of the competition titles at Venice this year come from just three countries: France, Italy, and the US and a lot of titles are connected to Netflix. Outside of those countries we get one film from Asia, one from the Middle East, two from South America, and two from UK/Ireland. If you include the Out of Competition titles there's more variety with Canada, Denmark, Ukraine, The Phillipines, and Estonia entering the chat.
After the jump a little bit about each of the 22 films competing for the Golden Lion, and a few of the Out of Competition films including the new Lars Von Trier. Plus that bewitching teaser to Tár, Todd Field's first film in 16 years...
The Venice film festival has wrapped and with it come those winged lions and other elaborately shaped awards. The jury led by director Michael Mann named Kim Ki Duk'sPietathe best film in competition. It's a violent mother/son drama, the son being a loan shark. Kim Ki-Duk, best known stateside for spring, summer, fall, winter and spring (2003) is no stranger to the Venice Festival having won multiple prizes for 3-Iron (2004) eight years ago.
The winners...
Golden Lion (Picture)Pieta Silver Lion (Director) & Special Jury Prize (Director)there seems to be some confusion about this as Ulrich Seidl for Paradise: Faith andPaul Thomas Anderson for The Master alternate who won what in various reports Best Actress Hadass Yaron for Fill the Void Best Actor (Shared) Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Master Screenplay Olivier Assasyas for Apres Mai (English Title: Something in the Air) Cinematography Daniele Cipri for E Stato Il Figlio
Best Young Actor & Best Actress
Mastroianni Award (Young Actor) Fabrizio Falco for Dormant Beauty and It Was the Son FIPRESCI Award (Competition) The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson) FIPRESCI Award (Orizzonti) The Interval (Leonardo Di Contanzo)
Orizzonti Jury PrizeTango Libre (Frédéric Fonteyne) Luigi De Laurentiis Award (Best First Feature)Kuf: Mold (Ali Aydin) Orrizonti: Best FeatureThree Sisters (Wang Bing) Orizzonti Jury PrizeTango Libre (Frédéric Fonteyne) Queer LionWeight Jeon Kyu-Hwan
a few notes...
The Weight, the winner of the Queer Lion, is about a hunchback mortician and the people in his life. Here is the NSFW trailer
IndieWire has a full lengthy list of winners since there are dozens of special awards outside the jurisduction of the main jury (including some of those prizes above). Several of these films picked up additional prizes.
Nice to hear the name "Frédéric Fonteyne" again, since he hasn't been on my radar since directing the wonderful romantic drama Une Liaison Pornographique. His new film is about a woman in a tangled relationship with three men. Must See!
PSH and the great Olivier Assayas accepting their prizes
Amusingly, news reports say that Philip Seymour Hoffman flying in at the last minute, barely arrived in time to pick up the prizes on behalf of The Master and apologized for his dishevelled appearance. You mean he's been aware of it all this time?!? The double actor win reopens the whole question of Oscar campaigns again. Will they actually let both stars compete in the leading category as they should? Can The Master leap the hurdle of critical darling Oscar problems like being more "challenging" and respected than actually warmly loved? Did There Will Be Blood set the stage for another Oscar run?
I'm kind of annoyed by The Envelope's suggestion that the jury wanted to give the Golden and Silver lion and Actor honors to The Master (sweeps not being allowed at most A grade festivals, thank god). If they really thought it was the best in every category, wouldn't they have handed it the Golden Lion? Instead let's congratulate Pieta and The Master and Paradise: Faith, all three of them winners to this jury.
Korean cinema has really been a hotspot this past decade, what with Kim Ki-Duk (Time, 3-Iron, Spring Summer...), Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder), Park Chan-wook (Thirst, Oldboy... the upcoming Stoker) and Lee Chang-dong (Poetry, Oasis, Peppermint Candy) winning over critics and Asian film fans quite regularly. South Korea's steady stream of great performances by actresses isn't hurting their rep either... especially not with The Film Experience ;) Just the other day I was skimming over The Housemaid again and, gah, actressy heaven. All four female players were totally working those roles.
Poonsan (Juhn Jai-hong) is a romantic drama about a South Korean messenger and his pick-up from North Korea that he's to smuggle across the border.
The Yellow Sea (Na Hong-Jin) is about a gambling addict taxi driver who takes an assassination job to pay off his debts. Trouble follows, naturally.
The Front Line (Jang Hoon) The director used to be an assistant director to the great Kim Ki-Duk. Apparently there is now friction between the two of them in regards to the goings on of the Korean film industry. This is a big budgeted war drama taking place in 1951.
Sunny (Kang Hyeong-cheol), is the year's biggest hit in Korea. And -- actress alert! -- it's about a group of girlfriends from school who reunite 25 years later to reminisce.
The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo) is a black and white picture about a man wandering around Seoul, running into friends and ex girlfriends and the like. It played at Cannes.
Hanji (or Scooping Up the Moonlight) (Im Kwon-taek) a government employee is assigned to revive the Hanji paper industry and he falls in love with it. Kwon-taek has been submitted once before with Chunhyang (2000)
It's tough to say what the Film Council will go for as there are a wide variety of factors in play from homefield success, through international auteur reps, to which films might appeal to AMPAS's sensibility. But the sad truth is that, whatever they choose, it's an uphill battle. Oscar has yet to nominate a Korean film... despite recent submissions as hugely acclaimed and well loved as Oasis (2002), Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2003), Secret Sunshine (2007) and Mother (2009).
Have you caught up with recent Korean successes like Mother, Poetry (my review), The Host or The Housemaid?
Tuesday, July 26, 2022 at 2:09PM 
Cate Blanchett in TÁR
