The Ties [+lee también:
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entrevista: Daniele Luchetti
ficha de la película] by Daniele Luchetti will have the honour of opening the 77th edition of the Venice International Film Festival (2-12 September), out of competition. Produced by Beppe Caschetto for IBC Movie together with Rai Cinema, the new film by the director of My Brother Is an Only Child [+lee también:
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entrevista: Daniele Luchetti
entrevista: Riccardo Tozzi
ficha de la película] and Our Life [+lee también:
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making of
ficha de la película] is based on a novel by Domenico Starnone and is described as “a mystery about feelings, a story of loyalty and faithlessness, of resentment and shame”. The main characters are Aldo (Luigi Lo Cascio, who recently won a David di Donatello Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Traitor [+lee también:
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Q&A: Marco Bellocchio
ficha de la película]) and Vanda (Alba Rohrwacher), who live in Naples in the early 1980s. Their marriage begins to break down when Aldo falls in love with young Lidia. Thirty years later, Aldo and Vanda are still married. The director states: “The Ties depicts the damage that love can cause when it suddenly makes us change course and the – even more serious – harm it can do when it disappears.” Also among the cast are Laura Morante, Silvio Orlando, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Adriano Giannini and Linda Caridi. The last time an Italian movie opened the Venice Film Festival was in 2009, with Baaria [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] by Giuseppe Tornatore.

Meanwhile, this year’s pre-opening film, set to unspool on 1 September, is the documentary Molecole [+lee también:
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entrevista: Andrea Segre
ficha de la película] by Andrea Segre, produced by ZaLab Film together with Rai Cinema, in conjunction with Vulcano and Istituto Luce Cinecittà. The director of Shun Li and the Poet [+lee también:
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entrevista: Andrea Segre
entrevista: Andrea Segre
ficha de la película] shot this movie during the lockdown, when he found himself held up in Venice, his father's city – and partly also his own. He was there to work on two projects – one for theatre and one for film – about the two major scourges afflicting Venice: tourism and high water levels. While he was filming, the coronavirus “froze” and emptied out the city before his very eyes, restoring it to nature, to its history and also, in a sense, to the director himself. He used the time to gather visual notes and stories, and he spent those days in his family’s house, where he had the opportunity to dig deep into his childhood memories and reminisce about being a son, which fascinated him more profoundly than he had thought possible. "To make a film, you have to conceive it, write it, organise it and film it,” declared Segre. “None of this happened for Molecole. I didn’t even realise I was making it. It was an experience for me, and the film came out by itself, in a time frame and dimension I could not have anticipated. Molecole just spurted out. Like water.”

Lastly, the members of the juries for this year’s Mostra have also been announced. For the Venice 77 competition, jury chair Cate Blanchett (see the news) will be flanked by writer-directors Veronika Franz (Austria) and Joanna Hogg (UK), Italian author Nicola Lagioia, writer-directors Christian Petzold (Germany) and Cristi Puiu (Romania), and French actress Ludivine Sagnier. The Orizzonti jury will be made up of French writer-director-actress Claire Denis (chair), Spanish helmer Oskar Alegria, Italian writer-director-author Francesca Comencini, and producers Katriel Schory (Israel) and Christine Vachon (USA). The “Luigi De Laurentiis” Award for a Debut Film will be handed out by a jury consisting of Italian writer-director Claudio Giovannesi, international festival director and programmer Remi Bonhomme (France), and producer and festival director Dora Bouchoucha (Tunisia). Finally, the Venice Virtual Reality jury will include US writer-director Celine Tricart (chair), British director Asif Kapadia and Japanese video game creator Hideo Kojima.

UPDATE (25 August): Cristi Puiu has been replaced by Matt Dillon as jury member.