Notes on BlackStar, San Sebastián, and Venice

Nayyar notes that Ford has described the development of Dreams in Nightmares as a form of “deep improvisation, but also very structured,” a working method that draws inspiration from Mike Leigh. On Tuesday, Toronto (September 5 through 15) announced that Leigh, whose Hard Truths will see its world premiere at the festival, will receive the TIFF Ebert Director Award. Earlier that same day, San Sebastián (September 20 through 28) named Hard Truths as one of sixteen films slated to compete for its top award, the Golden Shell.

In Leigh’s twenty-third film, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies) plays Pansy, a woman suffering both physically and mentally and arguing with just about everyone who crosses her path. Her husband has no idea how to handle her and her son aimlessly wanders the city’s streets, but her sister reaches out with a helping hand. Hard Truths is one of a good number of highlights of the fall festival season lined up for San Sebastián’s competition, including Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End.

Beginning with the opening film of its seventy-second edition, Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle, San Sebastián will also present several world premieres. In Costa-Gavras’s Last Breath, a renowned writer investigates the world of palliative care. Bound in Heaven, the directorial debut from screenwriter Xin Huo (Kung Fu Hustle, The Monkey King), focuses on the bond between a terminally ill man and a young girl.

A woman’s peaceful retirement in a village in Burgundy is upended when a man recently released from prison enters her life in François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming. In Her Place, the latest feature from Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent, The Eternal Memory), centers on a shy secretary’s fascination with the trial of a popular writer accused of killing her lover. And Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude is a portrait of bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey.

In other festival news, Locarno (August 7 through 17) has teamed up with MUBI to launch a new award for best first feature, and Venice (August 28 through September 7) will present its Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award to Claude Lelouch, the director best known for A Man and a Woman (1966), which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and two Oscars. Lelouch’s latest film, Finalement, starring Kad Merad as a high-flying lawyer struck with an ailment that makes it impossible for him to lie, will premiere out of competition at the festival. The promising cast includes Elsa Zylberstein and Sandrine Bonnaire.

Venice has also added Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter Two to its Out of Competition lineup. Costner has been developing his four-part western epic since the late 1980s, and when Chapter One premiered in Cannes a few months ago, Mark Asch, writing for InsideHook, noted that the director and star had put up much of the budget himself, sliding “all his chips into the middle of the table to make one of the most normal movies of all time. There has never been a more genial legacy play, a more middle-of-the-road display of hubris.”