Italy has submitted Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano as its candidate for Best International Film at the 96th Academy Awards.
06.09.2023 - 15:47 / deadline.com
Not so much beginners as people who never get a fair go, the mixed bag of gay men and women in Australian-Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping For Beginners, showing in Venice’s Horizons section, lives on a knife’s edge. Dita (Anamaria Marinca) owns the house where they jostle along together. Her Roma partner Suada (Alina Serban) has a teenage daughter Vanesa and another daughter, Mia, who is only five. Suada is volatile, belligerent and dying of cancer. Death is focusing her mind in alarming ways. Swear to look after the children, she shouts at Dita, holding a knife over her own arm.
Dita swears, then looks for support from Toni (Vladimir Tintor), her old friend and longest-standing housemate, who has told his spanking new boyfriend, Ali, he can move in. Who is this kid?, Dita says one night, knowing that won’t happen. Everything around her is chaotic, including Suada’s barely existent medical care. An assortment of young lesbians lives there too, having somehow found Dita’s safehouse. Stolevski’s camera moves around with them, held by unsteady hands. There is an anxious stomach lurch when we realize we are about to watch that camera shake and rattle for two hours. Tough luck. We’re in this world now. Nobody gets a smooth ride.
Everything Stolevski does here, in fact, is aimed at conveying what daily life is like for people jammed with their conflicts into a space that always seems too small. He films in a ratio that squares off the image, squeezing the sides of every shot; it feels as if there is barely enough space in the frame for anyone to turn around. Those interior spaces are never defined — the camera is almost always juddering between people’s faces, catching their expressions as they speak over
Italy has submitted Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano as its candidate for Best International Film at the 96th Academy Awards.
Guy Lodge Film Critic Unorthodox family structures yield correspondingly unpredictable drama in “Housekeeping for Beginners,” a vital, febrile multi-character study that further confirms writer-director Goran Stolevski as a talent to be reckoned with. Departing radically from the poise of his folk-horror debut “You Won’t Be Alone” and the gentle intimacy of its swift follow-up “Of an Age,” this study of domestic, romantic and generational conflicts in a crowded queer household instead embraces a spirit of antic chaos, both in subject matter and jagged, hit-the-ground-running execution.
Holly rings her school to tell them she is staying at home. She isn’t sick. She just can’t bring herself to go. “Bad things are going to happen today,” she says just above a whisper, her voice cracking.
It’s interesting how the Venice Film Festival has gone from one of the festivals of the fall festival season to arguably the best film festival in the world now, even overshadowing Cannes in recent years thanks to the fact that Netflix now avoids the Croisette for the most part because of France’s theatrical laws and save their Oscar contenders for the Lido. Venice has had an amazing run, arguably since 2017 when Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape Of Water” won the top prize and then went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, which has happened one more time since with “Nomadland” and several key Oscar contenders since).
Ben Croll Seated before a photo of filmmaker Sarah Moldoror, panelists at this year’s Women in Film roundtable shared strategies for greater industry parity, while reflecting on recent successes and standstills in that ongoing pursuit. Variety has been give access to the video of the panel discussion.
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Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Neon has acquired worldwide rights to Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” ahead of its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The movie, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, will also screen at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Origin” will be released in theaters later this year.
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Spanish film star Gabriel Guevara was arrested on sexual assault charges while in attendance this weekend at the Venice International Film Festival. The 22-year-old was the star of Prime V
The devil is in the details. Pink-nailed toes scrunching on a pink carpet; a packet of false eyelashes; piles of chips in a Vegas casino; the pills. Always the pills: squeezed in a palm that opens to reveal its little white prize; lined up in bottles on the bedside table; slipped into a pocket on the way to school. “Maybe the pills are too much,” ventures Priscilla Beaulieu to her boyfriend Elvis Presley, after one of his flares of temper where she just manages to dodge his fist. “I have doctors looking after me,” he growls. “I don’t need a second opinion.”
Marta Balaga Move over, Richard Donner. In “Behind the Mountains,” premiering in Venice’s Horizons section, Mohamed Ben Attia makes sure “you’ll believe a man can fly” once again. Although it might not be as graceful.
The plan was for renowned director William Friedkin to be appearing at the Venice Film Festival presenting the out of competition World Premiere of his latest production, an adaptation of Herman Wouk’s 1954 play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Unfortunately Friedkin died August 7th, but the show goes on anyway.
Gabriel Guevara has been arrested.
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Spanish actor Gabriel Guevara, star of Spanish Amazon Prime teen film franchise “My Fault,” has been arrested during the Venice Film Festival on alleged sexual assault charges, the fest has confirmed, specifying that the teen idol was not on the Lido for anything related to the event. Guevara, 22, had arrived on the Lido yesterday, which he publicised in several Instagram posts.
Diana Nyad was a swimming legend, a stellar athlete in the 1970s who achieved the heights of her sport, and then went on to a successful decades-long career in the broadcast booth for ABC Sports, ESPN, and elsewhere.
The cast, producers and collaborators of Roman Polanski’s The Palace showed their support for the filmmaker here in Venice today during a press conference for the movie that world premieres out of competition this evening.