Venice Review: ‘Saint Omer’ Explores Motherhood And Greek Tragedy

EXCLUSIVE: French director Alice Diop’s breakout feature Saint Omer has secured distribution in a raft of territories for Paris-based Wild Bunch International (WBI) following its Venice Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize win.

In recent years, Starz has built a cottage industry off of the success of “Outlander.” If it’s historical, sexy, and deals with some type of palace intrigue that doesn’t include dragons or elves, there’s a good chance that it’s ending up on Starz.

Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” has scored U.S. distribution with Neon’s boutique label Super after making its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it won two major competition awards.Super will release the film in theaters, following its U.S.

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.

Ben Croll Acclaimed documentarian Alice Diop marks her narrative debut with “Saint Omer,” a pulled-from-the-headlines legal drama that won the Grand Jury Prize and the award for best debut feature at the Venice Film Festival. High profile slots in Toronto, New York, and London are to come — making the French title one of the real breakouts of this fall season. The wrenching film follows Rama (Kayije Kagame), a young novelist covering the trial of an immigrant mother accused of infanticide. With major elements never in doubt – the accused, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), admits to the act, though she still pleads not guilty – the Venice winner turns around more intimate, philosophical, and unsettling questions.

A disparate group of characters collide in Dry (Siccita), a semi-apocalyptic drama premiering out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Paolo Virzi directs this glossy portmanteau film that assembles a strong cast for overlapping storylines and satirical social comment. 

A Syrian war film with a difference, Nezouh is a delicate and engrossing entry in Venice’s Horizons Extra section. Director Soudade Kaadan won Lion of the Future for 2018’s The Day I Lost My Shadow, and she continues to impress with this empathetic story of life under siege. 

Every film Jafar Panahi makes is an act of resistance. Currently in jail, the Iranian director has spent the past 12 years in and out of house arrest, banned from traveling or making films outside Iran and faced with numerous obstacles making films at home. That hasn’t stopped him.

In his acting life, Steve Buscemi has certainly mixed things up, finding time for Bruckheimer/Simpson blockbusters, Pixar animation and even Adam Sandler movies in a bid to avoid typecasting as the definitive New York indie guy. In his directing career, however, he tends to stick to a certain genre: small, intimate, personal films like his excellent 1996 debut Trees Lounge, which told the story of a melancholic underachiever whose life revolves around a seedy dive bar where the crowd of misfit regulars become his bizarre de facto family. Loneliness is a familiar motif in Buscemi’s work, and he excelled himself with that in 2005’s Lonesome Jim, starring Casey Affleck as a young man who’s failed in the big city and now has to move in with his parents.

Surprisingly, Nuclear is not one of Oliver Stone’s “devil’s advocate” documentaries, the spate of films he started making in the early 2000s that seemed to troll liberals everywhere by spending time with notorious human-rights abusers such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. In the real world right now, nuclear power is about as toxic as those three men put together, but this intelligent and surprising film is an investigation into how that PR damage came about, which makes it arguably more of a piece with his famous conspiracy thriller JFK than any of those. At nearly two hours, it’s a hard watch, being dominated by Stone’s dense, monotonous voice-over and featuring scientists with next to no screen presence (this explains a lot about Adam McKay’s decision to shoot Don’t Look Up with A-listers). Nevertheless, it puts forward a lot of unexpected proposals about nuclear energy, debunking powerful myths along the way.

Kevin Smith broke out in a big way when “Clerks” debuted in 1994. His black-and-white comedy about two slacker convenience store employees was filmed on a shoestring budget but was filled with so much heart and clever dialogue that it turned Smith into an indie cinema darling.

Forget Seberg, forget Mank, forget Judy — Andrew Dominik’s Venice Film Festival competition entry Blonde takes a blowtorch to the entire concept of the Hollywood biopic and arrives at something almost without precedent.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer The phrase “this one’s for the fans” is usually delivered from a defensive posture. But in the case of “Clerks III,” it’s practically a statement of purpose. Now nearly three decades removed from the microbudget indie that made him one of the most unlikely major auteurs of the 1990s, writer-director-podcaster Kevin Smith has once again returned to the New Jersey Quick Stop where he first staked his claim as a filmmaker, bringing his now-fiftysomething slacker heroes back to confront the listlessness of middle age. But the real focus of “Clerks III” is not really Randal and Dante at all, but rather the film “Clerks” itself, and Smith aims this third installment straight at his diminished but still rabid fanbase, for whom the film remains a touchstone.   

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

A powerful meditation on recent history, In Viaggio premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by previous Golden Lion winner Gianfranco Rosi, it follows the travels of Pope Francis, using mostly archival footage to paint not just a picture of the man, but of the modern world.

An eccentric 20-something tries to make friends in Amanda, a first feature for Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli. Premiering in Venice’s Horizons Extra section, it’s a comical, stylized character portrait with a strong central turn from Benedetta Porcaroli. 

I never start a review commenting on whatever the so-called Film Twitter Mafia have to say about it, sight unseen. Starting back at CinemaCon in April when its directo/co-star Olivia Wilde was served legal papers onstage regarding her custody hearings with ex Jason Sudeikis, there has been non-stop gossip about her movie Don’t Worry Darling. There has been so much of it, right up to today’s Venice Film Festival press conference (covered by my colleague Nancy Tartaglione) that you almost have to address the elephant in the room. Others can do that, but let us not forget there is also a movie here, one I was able to preview as just that a few weeks ago in Burbank. As a reviewer, to quote Being There’s Chauncey Gardner, “I like to watch,” and that means only what is on the screen.

Playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh is up to more deliciously fiendish tricks in The Banshees of Inisherin, a simple and diabolical tale of a friendship’s end shot through with bristling humor and sudden moments of startling violence. It world premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival Monday. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and the small handful of supporting players make the most of the author’s vibrant prose in McDonagh’s first film since Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri five years ago.

Wolf and Dog (Lobo e Cão) is the first feature film by Portuguese director Claudia Varejão. The movie follows a group of queer teenagers growing up in the uber-religious town of San Miguel in the Azores who yearn for more than the small-town ideals and the mundane lifestyle of their parents. Written by Varejão and Leda Cartum, the central characters try to build a community of their own. Still, the adults want the kids to remain stagnant, become farmers, fishermen, or mothers, and force them to enjoy that lifestyle. The movie has challenging moments to get through because they slow the pacing, making it a more tedious viewing experience, but the script works hard to subvert some harmful tropes.