PREVIEW: Venice seeks to consolidate role as Oscars springboard

By Peter Mayer Aug 21, 2008, 2:07 GMT

Rome - Burn After Reading, perhaps the most eagerly anticipated film at this year's Venice Film Festival, is not running in the official competition and thus won't win any prizes in the lagoon city.

But if a recent trend is to be confirmed, the film is likely to make a splash at the next Oscars.

Made by Joel and Ethan Coen, it has the honour of opening the festival in a world premiere that will lift the lid on the latest effort by the siblings whose No Country For Old Men triumphed at the last Academy Awards.

Billed as a spy-story laced with black humour, Burn After Reading boasts a high-powered Hollywood cast including George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand.

Last year, two films launched in Venice, Atonement and Michael Clayton, garnered seven Oscar nominations each, while in 2005 Brokeback Mountain scooped Venice's top Leone d'Oro (Golden Lion) award and later earned its Taiwan-born director Ang Lee an Oscar as Best Director.

The American Academy Awards also loom large over this year's official competition in Venice, with Oscar hopefuls and past winners included in the selection of 21 films vying for the Leone d'Oro.

Jonathan Demme, winner of a 1991 Best Director Oscar for Silence of the Lambs, is competing in Venice with Rachel Getting Married, a drama starring Anne Hathaway and Debra Winger about an estranged daughter's return to the family home for her sister's wedding.

Glamour stars Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger, both Academy Award winners, pair up for The Burning Plain which marks the debut as director of Mexican Guillermo Arriaga, the screenwriter of the acclaimed Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel directed by his compatriot, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

A strong US presence in Venice's main competition also includes Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei, and Kathryn Bigelow's Hurt Locker, a film shot in Jordan but dealing with the war in neighbouring Iraq and the physical and emotional strains faced by members of an elite US military unit.

The Hollywood-link coupled with the box-office success that usually accompanies films associated with the Academy Awards has helped raise the Venice Film Festival's commercial profile, but the event which was first held in 1932 has a long-established reputation for showcasing emerging cinema, including films from Asia and Latin America, and this year proves no exception.

Leading Japan's three-film contingent in the main competition, is Akires to kame (Achilles and the Tortoise) by Takeshi Kitano, whose talents including directing, writing, acting and designing video games.

A well-known figure in Venice, where stars and celebrities often arrive in gondolas to the festival's famous Lido venue, Kitano walked off with the 1997 Leone d'Oro for his Hana-bi (Fireworks) and was awarded a special prize for his direction of Zatoichi in 2003.

The Japanese line-up is completed by Hayao Miyazaki's Gake no ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea) and Mamoru Oshii's The Sky Crawlers - both animated films competing in a festival which has in the past shown its appreciation for the genre by bestowing a lifetime achievement award to Miyazaki in 2005.

Of the more than 50 films in Venice this year, representing 18 countries and including documentaries and shorts, the record for the longest film goes to Philippines director Lav Diaz's Melancholia, which with a running time of some seven-and-a-half hours is included in the Orizzonti (Horizons) section.

The festival's 65th edition - periods when it was not held included the turbulent late 1960s, following disruptions by left-wing student protestors, and the early 1970s - also marks a strong Italian presence, with home-grown films making up almost a fifth of the main competition.

Amongst these are veteran director Pupi Avati's Il Papa di Giovanna (Giovanna's Father) and Turkish-born, but long-time Italy- based Ferzan Ozpetek's Un giorno perfetto (A Perfect Day). These, like all films in the main competition are world premieres.

Perhaps fittingly, given the Italian undercurrent, this year's Lifetime Achievement award goes to Italian film master, Ermanno Olmi, 20 years after his The Legend of the Holy Drinker won the Leone d'Oro.