22/07/2013 - Venice announces a program of “small films that need the visibility that can only guarantee them a section of first works in the framework of a large festival”, according to its Delegate-General

The selection of seven films that will compete in the Critics’ Week (to take place from August 28th to September 7th) for the “RaroVideo Audience Award” and of another two that will open and close, respectively, the programme is, once more, inspired in “the mission to find fresh and original energies of expression in the international cinematographic panorama. This year we have once more bet in a programme that will please, incite interest, and focus the attention on small films and young authors that need the visibility that con only guarantee them a section of first works in the framework of a large festival”, explains the Delegate-General Francesco Di Pace.

The Italian film in competition is Zoran, il mio nipote scemo, Matteo Oleotto’s first feature-length film, a delicate and intelligent comedy featuring Giuseppe Battiston and filmed and produced in the region of Friuli and in Slovenia. Slovenia also celebrates the selection of Rok Biček’s Razredni sovražnik (Class Enemy), in which an authoritarian teacher arrives in a institute class and blows up the students’ routine through conflicts and tension.

The relationship between classmates is also the centre of focus in Återträffen (The Reunion) from Swedish artist Anna Odell. The film is divided in two parts: in the first, a typical alumni reunion, a “festen”, will be transformed into a psychological drama when Anna Odell, acting as herself, appears on the scene; in the second, the director herself relates, in the manner of a documentary, her attempt to show the film to those who actually were her classmates in school.

The incapacity to confront change characterises the three protagonists of the Chilean film produced by the Larraín brothers and directed by Sebastián Sepúlveda, Las niñas Quispe (The Quispe Girls). Meanwhile, the stateless director Noaz Deshe (born in Jaffa but settled in both Germany and the United States) exhibits in White Shadow a visionary and valiant style to tell, with amateur actors, the crude story of the persecution of albinos in African territories. The film was co-produced by Italy and Germany, with the support of actor Ryan Gosling as executive producer.

Homophobia is the subject of the last film in competition in the Critics’ Week: L’Armée du salut (Salvation Army). This is Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa’s first film, that thus takes his autobiographical novel, of the same name, about his move from Morocco to Europe, to the big screen.

The first of this year’s two special events is Alessandro Rak’s L’arte della felicità (The Art of Happiness) which will open the session. It is an animated film produced in Naples by a team composed of young cartoonists, comic authors, musicians, and the screenwriter and producer Luciano Stella (Big Sur). Its story combines spirituality, Buddhism, and introspective searching through the poverty in a rainy and dirty Naples.

The closing film was directed by another Chilean: Moisés Sepúlveda’s Las analfabetas (Illitterate) is an adaptation of a play that features the same actors, among whom figures Paulina García, protagonist of Gloria [+see also:
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film profile], for which she won the Golden Bear in Berlin.

(Translated from Italian)