Venice may not have had its typical roster of stars due to the Hollywood strike, but the oldest film festival in the world, which ends on Saturday, showed it can still serve as a springboard for important award candidates and social commentary.
The 80th edition of the festival on the Lido island has seen some extremely strong candidates, including sex-obsessed reanimated corpses, biopics of Enzo Ferrari, Priscilla Presley, and Leonard Bernstein, and tragic migrant dramas.
The Golden Lion for the current year will be chosen by a jury that includes Jane Campion and Laura Poitras, who won the award for their Big Pharma documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” last year. The panel will be chaired by La La Land director Damien Chazelle.
A recovering alcoholic befriends a guy with dementia in the final of the 23 films in competition, “Memory,” which aired on Friday and might be a last-minute contender for honors.
Because it was produced outside of the studio system, the movie received an exemption from the strike and its star, Jessica Chastain, was one of the few Hollywood celebrities who could attend the festival.
Chastain backed the strikes, saying actors had been silenced for too long on “workplace abuse” and “unfair contracts”. Adam Driver was also able to come for independent film ‘Ferrari’ from Michael Mann, and also backed the strikes.
But director David Fincher, who premiered his assassin movie ‘The Killer’ starring Michael Fassbender and has been closely associated with Netflix, triggered controversy by saying he understood “both sides”.
