Venice Review: Romain Gavras’ ‘Athena’

Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor Super, the boutique distribution label from Neon, has acquired U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” after it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize in Venice along with the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future award. “Saint Omer” was recently shortlisted for France’s submission to the Academy Awards and will premiere at the New York Film Festival and play the BFI London Festival. Neon plans a theatrical release. “Saint Omer” is Diop’s debut fiction feature, which she co-wrote with Amrita David and Marie NDiaye, and it stars Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville and Aurélia Petit. Toufik Ayadi and Christophe Barral of Srab Films produced alongside Arte France Cinéma and Pictanovo Hauts-de-France.

Neon’s boutique label Super has secured U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s acclaimed drama Saint Omer, following its world premiere earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival, where the film won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, as well as the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Feature.

Tilda Swinton is gracing the red carpet at the 2022 Venice Film Festival!

Cannes Film Festival. Yet, the Venice Film festival pre-dated its French film counterpart, with its inaugural festival taking place at the Excelsior hotel in Venice, Italy, in the year 1932.

Loneliness, postpartum-depression, motherhood, and isolation are at the core of Alice Diop’s feature film premiering at Venice, Saint Omer. Written by Diop and Marie N’Diaye, the movie stars Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanga. The film sends a message about the pressures of being a single parent and how women connect through trauma.

Oliver Stone is in Venice this year to debut his latest documentary, Nuclear. Written alongside political scholar Joshua S. Goldstein, the film sets out to re-examine the role nuclear power can play in our lives and makes the case that the energy source is humanity’s only realistic alternative to fossil fuels in the fight against climate change. Deadline sat down with Stone and Goldstein prior to the film’s premiere on the Lido to discuss why the pair decided to link up and how the lengthy production process almost “took the life” out of Stone.

After a lifetime spent creating outrage and offence, both on and off screen, Korean master Kim Ki-duk has left the world with this final film, finished by his friends after his death. The story of a passionate affair that curdles almost immediately into jealousy and hate – but ends on a lyrically wistful note – is a startlingly appropriate rogue’s epitaph.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Berlin-based sales outfit M-Appeal has closed distribution deals for Italy and Greece following the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The Israeli-Ukrainian co-production plays in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, and will have its North American premiere on Sept. 14 at Toronto Film Festival in the Contemporary World Cinema section. Rome-based P.F.A Films Srl will distribute the film in Italy, with a theatrical release planned for April 2023. The company’s recent titles include “Fabian – Going to the Dogs” by Dominik Graf, “The Audition” by Ina Weisse, and “Border” by Abbasi Ali.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Best-known for her role as Noemie in the hit French series “Call My Agent!,” Laure Calamy has emerged in recent years as one of France’s biggest stars and most versatile actors. After a busy career in theater and many notable supporting roles, she finally got a shot at leading roles, and kudos have followed, for Caroline Vignal’s romantic comedy “My Donkey, My Lover and I,” which was part of Cannes’ Official Selection and earned her a Cesar award, and Eric Gravel’s social drama “A Plein Temps,” for which she won best actress at Venice in the Horizons section. Calamy is now on a roll and she’s shown that she can play anything. Case in point: Over this summer, she was at Locarno to present Blandine Lenoir’s period drama “Angry Annie,” in which she plays a working mother who joins the Movement for the Liberation of Abortion and Contraception (the film won Variety‘s Piazza Grande Award), and she’s now at Venice with Sebastien Marnier’s psychological thriller “The Origin of Evil,” in which she flirts with genre. In-between Locarno and Venice, she also made a stop at Angouleme Film Festival, where she presented “Angry Annie” and Marc Fitoussi’s “Two Tickets to Greece.”

Blended families, where children alternate between parents and spend their lives with an assortment of half-siblings or kids from their parents’ previous relationships, are now so normal that it’s easy to overlook how painful the blending process can be. Bitter separations, disrupted households, new beds and new people appearing in them, the resentments children feel for the grown-ups’ failures and the interloping new partners pawing at the mom or dad who is rightfully theirs: none of this is easy, even in splits later described smoothly as “amicable.”

Emanuele Crialese put in a buoyant performance at the Venice Film Festival Sunday, during which he discussed how his identity informed his Golden Lion contender L’immensità.

French director Rebecca Zlotowski makes her Venice Film Festival competition debut on Sunday with drama Other People’s Children, casting the often neglected, sometimes maligned figure of the stepmother in a fresh light.

“Candy is better in France,” says a small boy to his brother in a flashback scene in For My Country (Pour La France), Rachid Hami’s personal drama premiering in Horizons at the Venice Film Festival. The boy’s Algerian family is considering moving to France, and his simplistic response sums up his innocent, optimistic view of his new home. But — as we have already discovered — France will bring tragedy to the family in this moving account based on Hami’s memories of his late younger brother.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Cairo-based film marketing and distribution outfit MAD Solutions has acquired rights for Arab territories to Venice competition entry “Les Miens” (“Our Ties”), directed by French actor and filmmaker of Moroccan descent Roschdy Zem. “Our Ties” is co-written by Zem with actor/director Maïwenn (“Polisse,” “Mon Roi”), who co-stars. Zem is a French cinema fixture, having starred in pics including “Other People’s Children” and directed several films including 2019’s “Persona Non Grata.” “Ties” is a drama about family dynamics centered around a man played by Sami Bouajila whose personality changes radically after he suffers a head injury. Zem plays his TV presenter brother.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Iconoclast, the international production group behind Romain Gavras’ Venice competition film “Athena,” is setting a wide-ranging slate of projects with emerging filmmakers from different audiovisual fields, including Leo Berne from the artists collective Megaforce, and Elias Belkeddar and Said Belktibia from the collective Kourtrajmé. The company is also producing the next projects of Harmony Korine and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, among others. In a rare interview, Nicolas Lhermitte, who co-founded Iconoclast with Mourad Belkeddar, says the company has emerged from the pandemic with a record number of developed projects. “We took the opportunity during the pandemic to develop a lot of projects, and today we have around 30 projects in the pipeline, spanning films and series that are set up at our studios in France, the U.S. and Germany,” says Lhermitte, who adds that Iconoclast aspired to “accompany multi-disciplinary artists to venture from one field to another, films, TV series, branded content, and music videos.”

Cannes Film Festival. Yet, the Venice Film festival pre-dated its French film counterpart, with its inaugural festival taking place at the Excelsior hotel in Venice, Italy, in the year 1932.

Romain Gavras’ immersive modern tragedy Athena just had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, receiving a 4 1/2-minute standing ovation in the process.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic There is no Athena housing project in Paris. That’s a name invented by “Athena” director Romain Gavras and partner in crime Ladj Ly for the banlieu apartment block that becomes a kind of makeshift fortress in an epic standoff between residents — first- and second-generation Black and Arab immigrants tired of being mistreated — and the French national police. Naming it thus lends what unfolds there a classical resonance, one that ties Gavras’ astonishing third feature to the tradition of Greek tragedy, though the situation could hardly be more timely. “Athena” tells the story of four brothers, one murdered on camera by a group of unidentified men in police uniforms, the three others torn about what to do next. Who were these assailants, shown stomping an innocent 13-year-old to death? Why does the French police seem to be protecting the culprits? And what will it take to obtain justice?