The China Mail - Venice Film Festival: A look back on the highlights

AFP looks back on some the festival's on-screen highlights and off-screen talking points.

- Star-gazing -

War, moral corruption, family dysfunction and female oppression all played out on the screen in what was a heavy programme, all while the festival's glamorous red carpet welcomed a bevy of A-list stars from George Clooney to Penelope Cruz.

Clooney was hard to miss in the first few days of the festival, picking up a lifetime achievement award at the opening ceremony, holding a "masterclass" and attending an event about AI in film.

"When you start reflecting on the years, you realise you really didn't have a career as much as a series of happy accidents," Clooney, 65, said after collecting his award.

- Fraternal love -

Some of the biggest crowds on the Venice Lido were for the premiere of "Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger", a behind-the-scenes look at how the British band's Gallagher brothers made up and hit the road for a reunion tour last year.

Manchester-born Liam and Noel arrived on a speedboat as a picture of fraternal love, having buried their 15-year feud to reform one of the biggest bands of the last 30 years.

The expletive-packed documentary, overseen by "Peaky Blinders" creator Steven Knight, captures the frosty moment the duo met for their first rehearsal -- with barely a word or a look exchanged between them.

- Moguls and Media -

Elon Musk was the star of the festival's longest film, "Musk", from acclaimed US documentary maker Alex Gibney, which casts a critical eye on the erratic billionaire, while media mogul Rupert Murdoch was the subject of Danny Boyle's feature, "Ink".

Boyle's high-speed juggernaut recounts the heady days of London's newspaper industry on Fleet Street in the 1960s when Murdoch's tabloid, The Sun, jolted British journalism with a cocktail of sensationalism, sex and scandal.

"Bunker" by French director Florian Zeller, starring Spanish superstars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, featured an enjoyable cameo from Paul Dano who appears as a character clearly inspired by Mark Zuckerberg.

- Marriage story -

Cruz was left in tears at the premiere of "Bunker" as she soaked up a 16-minute ovation along with husband Bardem for their film, which sees the real-life partners play a married couple whose relationship is on the rocks.

Asked if anything in their on-screen characters resembled their marriage, Bardem replied curtly: "Nothing."

But Cruz acknowledged that it was sometimes a challenge to find "a good balance in terms of how much you are speaking about work."

- War in Gaza -

The much-awaited "NAZA" from Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor about Israel's mass killing of civilians in Gaza surpassed "Bunker" on the clap-o-meter, earning a record 25 minutes of applause at its premiere Thursday.

Through anonymous interviews with Israeli officers and soldiers, the film reveals how an AI-enabled surveillance system identifies individual targets of airstrikes, and the hundreds of innocent civilians considered collateral damage.

Hollywood's deep divisions over Israel's conduct in Gaza was also illustrated as Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon revealed during a press conference how studios were still refusing to cast her due to her outspoken criticism of the war.

- Unseen women -

Only one woman director, Denmark's May el-Toukhy, was originally included in the main competition, growing to two with the late addition of "NAZA" and its woman co-director Rachel Szor.

Venice head Alberto Barbera blamed the dearth on fewer submissions by women filmmakers, and their lower quality.

Ironically, the film by El Toukhy -- "Kvinde Ukendt" (Woman Unknown) -- has as its protagonist a woman "unseen and voiceless" in her male-dominated home and society in the aftermath of WWII.

- Moral corruption -

The programming was often dark, with many films presenting characters either struggling with their consciences, or choosing to compromise themselves in the pursuit of money and power or to escape repression.

That was the case of "DAU" by Russian-born director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, a vast experimental cinema project that chronicles the troubled father of the Soviet nuclear programme, Lev Landau.

Others included "Primetime" with British star Robert Pattinson, about the host of real-life US paedophile-hunting TV show "To Catch A Predator", or "Wild Horse Nine", a dark thriller with John Malkovich playing a regretful CIA officer.

W.Tam--ThChM