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…”

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.

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.

When author and journalist Jacob Soboroff approached revered US documentary director Errol Morris to ask if he knew anyone who might be interested in making a documentary of his 2020 book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Morris promptly replied, “Yes, me,” he tells BDE. The film details the Trump administration’s viciously cruel and contentious border policy of separating immigrant kids from their parents when they didn’t have the right papers. “It’s an important issue because I hate Trump and I, in particular, hated this policy.”

Directed by award-winning Serbian Mladen Kovačević and produced together with Iva Plemić Divjak, the film will have its world premiere at Giornate Degli Autori on September 3. In the film, drawn to a paradise island in the quest for happiness, the protagonists grapple with the endless tensions between life's possibilities, but the question remains if they are living the life they should be living.

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.

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.”

It has now been some 50 years since one of the most terrifyingly titled of American horror films – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – both shocked unsuspecting audiences and thrilled horror film fans, who grew to appreciate they were experiencing a rather special piece of cinema. Insightful and astute Alexandre O Philippe’s cleverly structured film allows for plenty of thoughtful and balanced analysis, both of Chainsaw and of director Tobe Hooper’s impact on subsequent generations of filmmakers.

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.

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.”