While we’re still waiting for many of the exciting Cannes releases to break out from beyond the festival circuit (the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, for example, isn’t due until - outrageously - January 2014), along comes the Venice Film Festival. Celebrating its 70th anniversary, Venice is firmly establised as one of the ‘big three’ European festivals, alongside Cannes and Berlin. It’s also grown into one of the most important worldwide, and - along with Toronto - one of the few high-profile festivals to take place during the second half of any given year.
What does the 2013 edition have in store? The high-profile opening film is one of the most promising. Gravity - starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as astronauts adrift in space after their shuttle is destroyed - is director Alfonso Cuarón’s long-awaited follow up to Children of Men. After a particularly miserable summer of dumbest Hollywood fun, this could very well be the smart, technically dazzling spectacle we’ve been waiting for all year. Gravity is due an Irish release in November.
Elsewhere in English-language cinema, master documentarian Errol Morris returns with The Unknown Known - a sure to be provocative profile of Donald Rumsfeld. Night Moves is Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the remarkable (and bleak) Meek’s Cutoff. For horror fans, Ti West’s The Sacrament should prove a nice antidote to an arthouse heavy line-up. His last two films House of the Devil and The Innkeepers are two of the most entertaining and distinctive genre efforts of recent years, so let’s hope for a hat-trick.
Oh, and how about the ever-unpredictable James Franco as writer/director/actor on Cormac McCarthy adaptation Child of God? That’s not to mention new releases from the likes of Terry Gilliam, David Gordon Green, Stephen Frears and many more.
World cinema fans have even more to look forward to. A particularly exciting premiere is for anime genius Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises - his first film since 2008’s Ponyo on the Cliff. Staying with Japan, Yurusarezaru mono is, unusually, a samurai remake of beloved western Unforgiven - given how liberally American cinema has borrowed samurai stories over the decades, it will be interesting to see the pattern reversed.
Lukas Moodysson of Show Me Love and Together fame returns to Sweden after an unsuccessful stopover in Hollywood, and hopefully We Are The Best! lives up to its excited name. There are too many others to mention: filmmakers from Kosovo, South Korea, Australia, South Africa and everywhere in-between will present their latest works.
You can check out the full list here of screenings here. Gravity opens the fest on Wednesday, and it runs until the 7th of September. It’s worth keeping an eye on reactions over the next two weeks: even if we’re not lucky enough to be attending 10 days of great cinemas in beautiful Venice, the festival will flag the films we'll all need to get excited about for the rest of the year and well into 2014.
(Main image: Samuel Saturos)
