Venice 24

Zara Jian’s new film, world-premiering 6 September, may be a homage to the great Armenian filmmaker, Sergei Paradjanov, but it’s not a conventional documentary (or even a typical drama-doc for that matter). “This film is not a classic biopic dedicated to Paradjanov,” Jian insists. “The film is based on real events in my life. The film is a form of, let’s say, therapy for me through the drama in Paradjanov’s journey. This is my way of making the movie…”

Prolific Scottish documentary maker Kevin Macdonald takes John Lennon’s compulsive TV watching post-Beatles as the frame for his new film, One to One: John & Yoko, which world-premiered at Venice. We’re put into Lennon’s frame of mind as he tries to figure out what his life should now be. We’re also given a sense of the abuse that Yoko endured from the media and fans post-split. In telling their story, Macdonald was “just using what was in front of me, what was there in audio and archive,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

The final instalment of Wang Bing’s monumental, masterful Youth trilogy about the young, overworked and underpaid workers of Zhili’s vast textile district, strikes a melancholic note after the high-strung energy of its predecessors. As the director put it to BDE in Venice: “With all the ups and downs that these [past 20] years have brought…it has led me to think that there is no actual hope for a future.”

The sheer and awful brutality of war is examined in sprawling artistic fashion by filmmaker Amos Gitai in the simply (and appropriately) titled Why War, using as its spine an exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud which dwelled on violence in the name of religion, race and nationality, but which also takes in art, music, performance and literature. The whole is based on Gitai’s notion of embracing the filmmaker or the artist as a healer.

One hot weekend in 1965 in the US saw three contrasting cultural phenomena. The Beatles arrived to play their iconic Shea Stadium gig, the Watts Riots kicked off in LA and the World Fair was in full swing in Queens, New York. Romanian Andrei Ujică documents this weekend in his rich new documentary, at the same time inserting a fictional romance between two real-life chroniclers of the time. “Small lives are set against the huge backdrop of what's happening in the world,” Ujică, himself an avid Beatles fan, tells Business Doc Europe.

Elizabeth Lo received rapturous reviews for her debut documentary feature Stray (2020), about stray dogs in Istanbul. Michael Moore called it “a simple work of genius” and it won several awards on the festival circuit. Now, the Hong Kong and LA-based director is back with a project in a very different groove. It’s also about straying - but this time the protagonists are humans cheating on their spouses. The director explains more to BDE.

New docs by such heavyweights as Petra Costa, Amos Gitai, Asif Kapadia, Kevin Macdonald and Errol Morris play in the Out of Competition Non-fiction sidebar, while Wang Bing’s Youth - Homecoming gets the nod for Venezia 81 Competition. Orrizonti Competition hosts the feature docs Wishing On A Star by Péter Kerekes and Mistress Dispeller by Elizabeth Lo. A further nine docs on cinema are selected for Venice Classics.

Ukrainian producer Darya Bassel discusses her Venice documentary, world-premiering September 4 and described as “a visual diary of the war from the very first days,” with BDE. “Just psychologically, when you are in the war and you are making a film about the war, it’s quite complicated just to survive. On the other side, this job, this work, this film helped us to keep…sane!” she says.

The idea for Swedish Goran Hugo Olsson’s new feature doc, screening Out of Competition, came after he was given access to public TV archives, when he realised just how much material there was about Palestine and Israel. All the time, he says, there were idealists on both sides trying hard to come up with models for co-existence in the region, the director laments to Business Doc Europe. “It’s a takeaway that so many people had these ideas and we could have been in a totally different situation…All the people who are most aggressive, most violent - they have prevailed.”

Italian Massimo d’Anolfi and Martina Parenti’s Bestiari Erbari Lapideri, which world-premieres Sept 3, is a film divided into three acts and which deals with three distinct and fundamental subjects: animals, plants and stones. “It is first and foremost a reflection on the relationship between humans and nature that exists beyond our impact on it,” the filmmakers say of their latest opus. “We build real and imaginary cages to contain it, but nature always evades our attempt to tame it.”