Profile: The 73rd Venice Film Festival

THE oldest film festival in the world has cancelled its gala dinner and beachside party in solidarity with the victims of last week’s devastating earthquake in Italy.

Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera took the decision with the support of the event’s parent organisation, the Venice Biennale.

The announcement was made as funerals continue for those killed in the quake in central Italy which claimed the lives of at least 290 people and injured hundreds more.

In a statement, the Biennale said: “La Biennale di Venezia shares in the bereavement, expresses its deepest sorrow for the victims, and its utmost solidarity and support to the communities struck by the earthquake.”

The tragedy has cast a shadow over the festival, which is one of the most glamorous in the world.

In the past three years alone, its premieres of Birdman, Gravity and Spotlight have gone on to win Oscars.

This year’s event still seems certain to attract widespread interest despite the cancellation of tomorrow’s opening celebrations.

WHAT ARE THE HIGHLIGHTS?

IT HAS been predicted that virtual reality technology could capture more attention than the stars parading on the red carpet this year. Jesus VR – the Story of Christ will be unveiled on Thursday, marking the largest investment ever made in attempting to make immersive virtual reality available to mainstream cinema audiences.

Filmed in 360 degrees, the movie gives audiences the feeling of being spectators at the nativity and onwards through Jesus’s life to the resurrection.

A special salon has been set up at Venice for the film which it is hoped will help cinemas compete with the gaming world.

Film expert Michael Pigott of Warwick University said: “Just as 3D cinema offered a way to draw audiences that had been lost to television back to the cinema, in the 1950s, so VR provides a unique selling point in the battle against the ubiquity and accessibility of online content.

“Entertainment companies can market a unique experience that audiences can only have if they go to a VR-capable cinema or purchase the requisite headset and hardware.”

Not everyone is a fan, with director Steven Spielberg complaining that VR lets audiences “forget the story”.

Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder, agrees. “It’s not storytelling,” he said. “People have been trying to do [VR] storytelling for 40 years. They haven’t succeeded.

ANY MORE?

JESUS VR is US-backed and American cinema in general has a strong presence at the 73rd Venice Film Festival with new movies from Tom Ford, Terrence Malick, Derek Cianfrance and Damien Chazelle among the main highlights.

Chazelle is following up Whiplash, which won a 2014 Oscar nomination for best picture, with La La Land. The film, which stars Ryan Gosling as a jazz pianist, opens the festival.

Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans stars Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender and is adapted from an ML Stedman novel about a lighthouse keeper who finds a baby alone on a drifting lifeboat.

Another literary adaptation, this time of Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan, is Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, starring Amy Adams.

Meanwhile, Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves star in The Bad Batch from Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour. It follows her feminist Iranian western/vampire debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

His first film since achieving a critical and commercial hit with Sicario, Arrival from Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is a sci-fi drama about an alien spacecraft that lands on Earth. Also in the competition is Natalie Portman’s biopic of Jackie Kennedy directed by Chile’s Pablo Larrain.

WHAT ELSE IS ON?

SHOWING at the festival but not in the competition is what has been billed as Mel Gibson’s comeback. Hacksaw Ridge is a Second World War drama about Desmond Doss, the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour.

Also in an out-of-competition slot is The Journey, directed by Nick Hamm, which tells the story of the eventual friendship between former enemies Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. Another British film is Alice Lowe’s Prevenge, a “pregnancy horror”.

Hotly anticipated is The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, an adaptation of Peter Handke’s philosophical play from award-winning German director Wim Wenders.

Other major figures at the festival are Emir Kusturica and Monica Bellucci in On the Milky Road, a three-part account of a troubled life, and Russian theatre and film director Andrei Konchalovsky with Ray, a drama following three people whose paths cross during a terrible time of war. Dutch director Martin Koolhoven makes his English language debut with Brimstone, a western thriller starting Dakota Fanning, Kit Harington and Guy Pearce.

Spotlight star Liev Schreiber appears in The Bleeder, a boxing drama about legendary lightweight Chuck Wepner, from Canadian filmmaker Phillippe Falardeau, which also stars Elisabether Moss, Naomi Watts, Ron Perlman and Jim Gaffigan.

The festival closes on September 10 with the Magnificent Seven remake directed by Antoine Fuqua.