Through the lens of Covid, women and Welles among the best of Venice film festival

Venice, the first international film festival to take place in the time of COVID-19, has an impressive line-up.

Vanessa Kirby, star of two films nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festiva Picture: John Feder.

Venice, the first international film festival to take place in the time of COVID-19, has an impressive line-up. There might be fewer world premieres of studio pictures this year, but the socially distanced event has assembled a strong array of features, more films from women directors and a new movie from Orson Welles, 35 years after his death.

Venice’s best picture award, the Golden Lion, has gone to movies that have become awards season staples: in the past three years it went to Joker, Roma and The Shape Of Water. But this year, with Hollywood studios opting to stay away, the spotlight will be on newer or less high-profile names.

Australian filmmaker Roderick MacKay’s feature, The Furnace, has been selected for the Orizzonti competition, which focuses on films that represent the latest aesthetic and expressive trends in international cinema.

The Furnace is set in Western Australia in 1897, and tells the story of a young Afghan cameleer, played by Ahmed Malek, who forms an alliance with a mysterious stranger on the run.

The cast also includes Baykali Ganambarr, who won the award for best young actor at Venice in 2018 when he starred in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale.

Among the works in official competition is Nomadland, from director Chloe Zhao, whose first Marvel feature, The Eternals, will be released early next year.

Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand, is about a woman in her 60s who takes to the road in a van in the wake of economic collapse. Zhao based the film on Jessica Bruder’s book of the same name. Also in competition is Miss Marx, writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli’s biopic about Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, played by Romola Garai.

Venice has been criticised in the past for its poor representation of the work of women filmmakers, but in 2020 there are eight films directed by women in contention for the Golden Lion.

Vanessa Kirby, who played Princess Margaret in The Crown, stars in two of them — she is in The World To Come, Mona Fastvold’s drama set in rural New York in the 1850s, alongside Katherine Waterston and Christopher Abbott, and in Kornel Munruczo’s Pieces Of A Woman, a story of birth, grief and loss that also stars Shia LaBeouf, Ellen Burstyn and Sarah Snook.

Other contenders for the Golden Lion include Quo Vadis, Aida?, Jasmila Zbanic’s drama about the dilemmas of a translator in Srebrenica in 1995; Khorshid (Sun Children), Iranian director Majid Majidi’s story of a group of children struggling to survive and support their families; Laila In Haifa, an intersecting narrative of five women over the course of a single night from Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai; The Disciple, Chaitanya Tamhane’s exploration of the world of Indian classical music; and Azerbaijani filmmaker Hilal Baydarov’s In Between Dying, the tale of a restless young man’s voyage of discovery

The two awards being presented for career achievement will go to actor Tilda Swinton and director Ann Hui.

Swinton appears in a work screening at Venice this year, Pedro Almodovar’s The Human Voice, a short film version of Cocteau’s celebrated play of the same name, a story of pain and isolation.

Hui, a Hong Kong director with a rich and varied career that spans four decades, also has a film screening out of competition: Love After Love, shot by Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, which is set in Hong Kong in the 1930s, and is based on the first published short story by Eileen Chang.

Actor Regina King, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress in If Beale Street Could Talk, makes her directorial debut with One Night In Miami, which is screening out of competition. The film is based on a play by Kemp Powers about a 1964 meeting between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown.

Also showing out of competition is a documentary from Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, Salvatore: Shoemaker Of Dreams, about shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo. In addition, Guadagnino has a short film, Fiori, Fiori, Fiori, that he made during the pandemic, in which he travels from Milan to Sicily with a minimal crew, visiting childhood friends to find out how they have been experiencing the virus and its ramifications.

Director Abel Ferrara has a documentary, Sportin’ Life, about an international art project curated by Saint Laurent’s creative director, Anthony Vaccarello.

And Orson Welles is represented by Hopper/Welles, a posthumous work that brings to the screen an extended conversation about filmmaking that took place in 1970 between Welles and Dennis Hopper, in the wake of Easy Rider’s release.

Great documentarian Frederick Wiseman, as prolific as ever at the age of 90, has a new work, City Hall, a characteristically detailed and lengthy examination of an American institution; in this case, local government in Boston.