From Stéphane Brizé to *The Girl with the Leica*, the 10 most eagerly awaited films in Venice

Following *Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri* and *The Banshees of Inisherin*, Martin McDonagh’s new film – a black comedy starring John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi and Mariana Di Girolamo – is a natural fit for this list. The plot centres on two CIA agents who, shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup, are sent to Easter Island. The synopsis alone promises fireworks and entertainment, and it is sure to be one of the most talked-about films in this year’s competition.

Among the exceptionally rich selection of non-competition non-fiction films, we would like to draw particular attention to the new film by the brilliant Mariano Llinás, an Argentine director who has created some of the most surprising and original feature films of the new millennium (one need only think of the torrential *La flor*). As his career has amply demonstrated, a documentary by him is never predictable, and we are more than ready to embark on a new journey through Argentina’s past and culture, centred on the immortal author Jorge Luis Borges. Its running time (330 minutes) will certainly not deter Llinás’s many film fans.

This film could well be the real ‘dark horse’ of the Venice Film Festival; it marks the definitive completion (?) of a multidisciplinary project, situated somewhere between cinema and anthropology, initially conceived as a work loosely based on the life of the Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau. Khrzhanovsky began working on it some twenty years ago, and in the meantime numerous films and parallel projects have already been realised: even more than the narrative itself, what matters is the overall sense of a monumental, complex and multi-layered undertaking, where cinema embraces the performing arts and the boundaries between reality and fiction appear increasingly blurred.

The great director of deeply unsettling films such as *Tetsuo* and *A Snake of June* has, for several years now, been devoting himself to making war films, seeking to portray the loss of humanity among soldiers and the realisation that battle takes place, above all, within our own minds. Following *Fires on the Plain*, *Killing* and *Hokage*, Tsukamoto has now delivered a new film that promises to be deeply humanistic and capable of stirring the Venetian audience. It is in the running for the Golden Lion.

The final film in the Venice Film Festival competition that we’d like to highlight in particular is Werner Herzog’s return to the Lido, exactly one year after he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and the screening of his beautiful documentary *Ghost Elephants*. Inspired by a true story, this film centres on two sisters (played by Rooney Mara and Kate Mara) who speak in unison, love the same man and share the same dreams. They seem like yet another pair of outsiders in the cinema of the great German director, who has always been able to portray unconventional characters – often mad and extremely brilliant… just like himself.

Whenever a film by Lav Diaz is screened at a festival, it is always a major event for the more cinephile section of the audience, and this new work of his – shown out of competition – is certainly no exception. Exactly ten years after winning the Golden Lion for *The Woman Who Left*, Diaz brings a film to Venice that explores the horrors of colonisation, the mistreatment and violence suffered by those exploited to build churches commissioned by the Spanish invaders. We are certain it will be yet another precious piece in the great mosaic that is the Filipino director’s filmography.

We are truly delighted to see the name of Alina Marazzi, the director who will open the Orizzonti section with a film adapted from Helena Janeczek’s 2007 novel of the same name. At its heart is the story of Gerda Taro, the first female photojournalist to die on the battlefield. The hope is that Alina Marazzi will once again move audiences as she did in *Un’ora sola ti vorrei*, one of the most poignant Italian films of the new millennium.