27/07/2010

Once again, Cineuropa.org will be the international media partner of Venice Days (promoted by ANAC e 100autori) and will publish daily online articles on the selected films as well as video interviews with the directors. New this edition, however, will be film discussions with 27 young festival participants chosen from the 27 EU countries (see news ).

Presented this morning in Rome, the Venice Days programme is as rich as ever, despite the serious crisis and uncertainty heavily limiting its potential.

According to Venice Days director Giorgio Gosetti, "coherence and diversity" best define this year’s selection of 12 titles (of which four are feature debuts) from 12 countries that "will spark passions and debate". Chile will be in Venice Days for the first time, with the poetic The Life of Fish by Matias Bize, while renowned French director Bertrand Blier brings his "lethal comedy" The Clink of Ice. Two young Italians, Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini, offer up their Pasolini-esque debut Et in terra pax, a story of lost adolescence shot in Rome’s poor outskirts. Sarah Bouyain, assistant director to Idrissa Ouedraogo, also makes her debut with The Place in Between, about a teenage girl who leaves Paris to search for her mother in her native Burkina Faso. And from Antonio Capuano comes a story of violence and tenderness, L'amore buio, featuring Corso Salani in his last performance.

Animated cinema returns to Venice Days after seven years with Colombian title Pequeñas voces, by Jairo Carrillo and Oscar Andrade, and American indie film is present with Paul Gordon’s The Happy Poet, while Cirkus Columbia [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Danis Tanovic
film profile] marks the homecoming of Oscar winner Danis Tanovic with a story of solitude and hope set on eve of the Balkan War. One of Europe’s most interesting avant-garde filmmakers, Marion Hänsel, is brining Noir Ocean, a Belgian/French/German co-production about three young sailors on a French naval ship in the Mururoa atoll in the early 1970s.

The tragic fate of two teenage twins after their mother’s death lies at the heart of Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, while Seren Yüce’s debut feature Majority revisits Romeo and Juliet in a conformist, middle-class Istanbul. Lastly, Giovanni Davide Maderna and Sara Pozzoli’s Cielo senza terra is an engaging experiment on cinéma vérité.

The Label Europa Cinemas will be given to the best film of the selection.

(Translated from Italian)