Five words sum up this year’s Venice Film Festival: “Based on a true story.” Movie screens exploded with the forces affecting our world: war, terrorism and the vast migration bringing hundreds of thousands of people to the shores of Europe.
Outside, hundreds of demonstrators – many of them barefoot – marched on Friday to the festival’s Palace of Cinema to show support for those fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.
Throughout the 11-day festival, as beachgoers lounged on the sands of Venice's lush Lido island, filmmakers and actors expressed dismay at the migrants' plight and their mixed reception in Europe. Displaced people were on screen in A Bigger Splash, where refugees plucked from the Mediterranean were background players to the story of a rock star (Tilda Swinton) and her emotional entanglements.
Luca Guadagnino’s film drew boos at its press screenings from some who found the juxtaposition crass.
Reality was hard to avoid at the festival, which ended yesterday. Many of the movies told stories that seemed to come straight from the news.
There were African child soldiers in Cary Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation, Afghan civilians caught between the Taliban and Danish troops in Tobias Lindholm's A War and Turkish brothers trapped in escalating political violence in Emin Alper's Frenzy.
Several films depicted real-life criminals and the social forces that made them: the assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, incited by extremist rabbis in Amos Gitai's Rabin: The Last Day; Johnny Depp's Boston gangster in league with corrupt cops in Scott Cooper's Black Mass; and kidnappers protected by a military dictatorship in Pablo Trapero's Argentine thriller El Clan.
Festival director Alberto Barbera said the line-up reflected a feeling among filmmakers that “we seem to have lost control of our world”. “They feel that they need to face reality; to reflect on reality,” he said.
