Venice Immersive: Songs for a Passerby by Celine Daemen
Celine Daemen is back in Venice with 'Songs for a Passerby', described as a VR opera about our tenuous relationship with the transitory nature of reality. “I have attempted to create an experience that investigates the connection between the physical and the metaphysical world,” director Daelen says of her new work. In 2022 she presented the VR 'Eurydice, a Descent into Infinity' at the Venice interactive sidebar.
Feature docs in Venice Critics Week 2023
The Chilean/German Malqueridas by Tana Gilbert plays in Competition while Andres Peyrot’s God Is a Woman (France, Switzerland, Panama) will open the section. The Italian doc Passione critica by Simone Isola, Franco Montini, Patrizia Pistagnesi gets a Special Screening. Venice Critics Week runs 30 August to September 9. Malqueridas will compete for the Grand Prize of €5000 and the Audience Prize (€3000).
Malqueridas wins 2 Venice SIC awards
Tana Gilbert’s documentary, about women in a Chilean prison and shot entirely on clandestine cellphones, won the IWONDERFULL Grand Prize and Mario Serandrei – Hotel Saturnia Award for Best Technical Contribution. The jury underlined how, “the director puts us side by side with the incarcerated women, without passing any judgment on their value, and this is a prowess of cinema's poetic license.”
Venice Critics’ Week 2023: Malqueridas by Tana Gilbert
The strength of Sisterhood is fully evident in Tana Gilbert’s Malqueridas, in which mothers incarcerated in a Chilean prison help each other through their darkest days, separated from their children. They find affection and community in each other’s presence, together protecting and empowering their existence and humanity, proof that Sisterhood is feminism’s most powerful weapon and therefore the Patriarchy’s mightiest opponent.
Venice Critics Week/TIFF Docs interview: God Is A Woman by Andrés Peyrot
Almost 50 years ago, the Oscar-winning French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau turned up at Panama’s San Blas islands intending to make a film about the Kuna community there. But the film was never shown, and more or less forgotten about until, quite by accident, Swiss-Panamanian director Andrés Peyrot heard of its existence and determined not only to track it down but to finally screen it to the Kuna folk half a century later.
Venice Critics Week: The Outpost by Edoardo Morabito
Eco-warrior Chris Clark, the protagonist of The Outpost world-premiering in Venice, was the kind of maverick you expect to find in a Werner Herzog movie or an epic 19th Century novel, a visionary who would attempt to put on a Pink Floyd concert in the Amazon rain forest so as to convince the Brazilian government to set up a nature reserve. “We shared the fact that we were ‘out-of-era’ idealists” director Morabito tells BDE of his subject.
Venice Classics: Frank Capra: Mr America by Matthew Wells
The legendary Hollywood filmmaker is profiled in the new documentary by UK docmaker Matthew Wells, who has previously profiled other such cinema luminaries as Stanley Kubrick. “I was really…interested in the symbolism of Frank Capra’s rags to riches story, what it came to mean and how that resonates with his movies,” Wells tells BDE of his contradictory subject.
