Festivals: Locarno, Venice, and More

Todd Haynes will receive the Pardo d’onore Manor, the Locarno Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award, on August 7. The festival will also screen Haynes’s 1991 film Poison (image above). Jean-Marie Straub will receive his Pardo d’onore Manor on August 11.

For Cineuropa, Camillo De Marco talks with Locarno director Carlo Chatrian: “This year, there did seem to be one thing in common between a lot of the films that question or challenge the male identity: male protagonists who behave in a provocative way.” There’s also “a strong documentary presence this year.” We’ve got notes on most of the films lined up for Locarno’s seventieth edition right here.

“Italian director Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico 1988, a biopic about Velvet Underground lead singer Christa Paffgen, is set to open the Venice Film Festival’s Horizon section,” reports Deadline’s Diana Lodderhose. Nico will be played by Trine Dyrholm, who won a Silver Bear at the Berlinale last year for her performance in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune. “‘This is the story of Nico after Nico,’ said Nicchiarelli, who directed Cosmonauta, which debuted in Venice in 2009. ‘People usually talk about her only in relation to men when she was young: Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Alain Delon, Iggy Pop. I once read an interview that “at the age [of thirty-four,] Nico was finished.” That’s not true . . . I wanted to tell the story of her journey from a different point of view.”

Yesterday, Lodderhose reported on this year’s Venice Classics lineup, the sidebar of restorations to be chaired by Italian director Giuseppe Piccioni, whose jury will present awards for the best restoration and the best documentary on cinema.

The Venezia Classici 2017 lineup:

• Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964)
• Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976)
• Claude Chabrol’s The Third Lover (1962)
• Mike De Leon’s Batch ’81 (1982)
• Giuseppe De Santis’s Under the Olive Tree (1950)
• Marco Ferreri’s The Ape Woman (1964)
• Milos Forman’s Black Peter (1963)
• Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967)
• Jean Grémillon’s Daïnah la métisse (1932)
• Nacer Khemir’s Wanderers of the Desert (1984)
• Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985)
• John Landis’s Into the Night (1985)
• Kenji Mizoguchi’s A Story from Chikamatsu (1954) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
• Yasujiro Ozu’s Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952)
• Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• Raoul Walsh’s The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956)
• James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1933)

The seventy-fourth edition of the Venice International Film Festival will run from August 30 through September 9.

The Sundance Film Festival has presented its look for the 2018 edition running from January 18 through 28 and announced a new “Indie Episodic’ section specifically for stories told in multiple installments, with an emphasis on independent perspectives.”

Joachim Trier’s Thelma will evidently see its world premiere when it opens the forty-fifth Norwegian International Film Festival, running in Haugesund from August 20 through 25. Jorn Rossing Jensen has the lineup in Variety. “Written by Trier and Eskil Vogt and starring Eili Harboe, Okay Kaya, Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Henrik Rafaelsen, [Thelma] follows a young woman who falls in love and discovers that she has terrifying and inexplicable powers,” noted Graham Winfrey at IndieWire in April.

“The Sarajevo Film Festival, Southeast Europe’s leading movie event, has unveiled its competition program, with the latest pic from Berlinale Golden Bear winner Semih Kaplanoglu among the world premieres,” reports Variety’s Leo Barraclough.Grain is “a dystopian tale set in a society dominated by global corporations in which a genetic crisis leads to massive crop failure.” The twenty-third edition of the festival is on from August 11 through 18.

“The San Sebastian Film Festival has revealed thirteen of the first and second films by European, Asian and Latin American filmmakers set to compete for the Kutxabank-New Directors Award,” reports Screen’s Andreas Wiseman. “Among the films are Chilean film Princess, produced by Juan de Dios, Pablo Larraín, and Fernanda del Nido, and the first film by Marine Francen, former assistant to Michael Haneke and Olivier Assayas, starring Pauline Burlet (The Past) and Géraldine Pailhas (Young & Beautiful).” The sixty-fifth edition runs from September 22 through 30.

Screen International is also posting its daily editions from the Jerusalem Film Festival, whose thirty-fourth edition is on through Sunday.

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