Venice Film Festival 2024
-
“I Really Wanted to Push Back Against This Illusion of Japanese-ness”: Neo Sora on Happyend
“Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up. The topic Sora could talk about forever and to which we devote the last few minutes of our allotted time is music, a connection that long predates his first feature-length foray into fiction. An eclectic audiovisual artist, Sora’s a member of […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 25, 2024 -
“The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 24, 2024 -
Venice Film Festival 2024: Before the Revolution
I was trying to make sense of my notes on Happyend when I noticed him. Arms akimbo, left hand drumming his gun holster, the cop was patrolling the press room looking equal parts annoyed, bored, and baleful. I glanced away; when I looked up again, another colleague had joined him in inspecting the crowd of journalists typing at their laptops like exam invigilators. For a festival as militarized as Venice, the sight might not be front-page news: Ever since my first trip in 2014, the security corps deployed across the Lido have grown almost exponentially, reaching near-Orwellian levels in 2020, […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 19, 2024 -
“Ordinary People Who Become Very Violent”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Cloud
The J-horrors that catapulted Kiyoshi Kurosawa from reliable gun for hire under the Japanese studio system to internationally revered auteur saw terror as indissolubly bound with tech. Conceived at the turn of the millennium, they spoke to those years’ paranoias about digital life: ghosts pouring out of dial-up internet (Pulse, 2001), senseless murders upending pristine cityscapes (Cure, 1997), and lives aremodeled by perfect doubles (Doppelganger, 2003). Cloud, his latest, offers a new equation, no longer anchoring dread to media but capitalism. It’s not that computer screens are nowhere in sight; the film’s hero, Yoshii (Masaki Suda), is a hustler who […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 10, 2024 -
“Sit Here. Stand Here. Work Here. Slap Her Here”: Lav Diaz and Hazel Orencio on Phantosmia
Since the late 1990s, Lav Diaz’s cinema has explored the Philippines’ troubled history with colonization, authoritarianism, corruption, poverty, macho-feudalism and the tensions that animate and enliven the sociopaths of today. His durational works are simultaneously a test of patience and spirit and assertions that the stories of Filipinos deserve time and space to unfold in all of its complexities. Diaz’s works paint portraits of good men and women whose morals disintegrate along with their minds, poisoned by the pressures of the world, leading them to commit uncharacteristic acts of violence one would think they are too progressive or too intelligent […]
by Jason Tan Liwag on Sep 3, 2024
