Roundup: Venice Int'l Film Festival blurs lines between reality, fiction cinema

The 72nd Venice International Film Festival kicked off here on Wednesday promising a rich line-up of fiction movies anchored to a dimension of reality and documentaries with a creative component.

The very movie the festival opened with was Everest, a work by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur about the two rival missions up the mountain in 1996. The movie tells a true story and thanks to the advancement in filming techniques puts spectators in the spot of telling apart what has been filmed in studio and what has not.

"The great part of directors from around the world in this moment seem to feel an urgent need for facing reality," the director of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival Alberto Barbera, who has also headed the festival's past three editions, told Xinhua during the opening press conference on the Lido of Venice.

Barbera noted that most of the films at the festival have been inspired by current affairs, true facts and historical figures. "We cannot call this a crisis of creativity, but a shared need for reflection on reality," he said.

Wars and conflicts, migrant flows and uncontrolled economy are among the "historical phenomena of huge dimensions" faced by humankind, Barbera went on saying. "The world seems to have lost control of reality and directors are calling on humankind to be aware and face problems," he concluded.

From Sept. 2 to Sept. 12, the 21 world premieres competing in the section Venezia 72 will strive for the Golden Lion, one of the most prestigious film awards globally, awarded by the festival's international jury chaired this year by Mexican film director Alfonso Cuaron.

The Venice International Film Festival, whose first edition was held in 1932, enjoys the distinction of the oldest film festival in the world.

For the second consecutive year, the Orizzonti Competition, dedicated to the latest cinema trends, also began on the same day as the opening ceremony. The screening of Un Monstruo de mil cabezas (A Monster with a Thousand Heads) by Mexican director Rodrigo Pla inaugurated the section with the story of a common case of medical error which turns into tragedy.

The sections Out of Competition, or films by established directors, Venice Classics, restored works, and Biennale College-Cinema, a training workshop for micro-budget films, are also included in the official selection.

The independent sections feature the International Critics' Week, debut films organized by a commission nominated by the National Union of Italian Film Critics, and Venice Days, promoted by the Italian Association of Filmmakers and Italy's audiovisual authors association 100 Autori.

Lao Pao Er by Chinese director Guan Hu, about street gangs in Beijing, will close the festival, which features other Chinese movies including Jia (The Family) by Liu Shumin, in the International Critics' Week, and Tharlo, in the Orizzonti section, directed by Chinese director Pema Tseden and filmed in the Tibetan-inhabited region of Qinghai.

Johnny Depp, Kristen Stewart, Tilda Swinton and Eddie Redmayne, who won the best actor Oscar for performance as celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything last February, are among the celebrities slated for the red carpet at the festival.

For the first time, this year the festival will include a night public screening of numerous films at a new open-air arena in the gardens of the Casino at Lido of Venice, which will also host meetings with cinema personalities to give occasional spectators and non-accredited festival-goers the opportunity to experience the festival in a spirit of entertainment and free of charge. Endit