Feature: Love, evergreen topic at Venice Int'l Film Festival

Several films competing for the Golden Lion at the ongoing Venice International Film Festival try to depict in different ways the most universal feeling in the world, love.

"When I started this project, I began with one singular thought. What would happen if we lived in a world in which love does not exist anymore? What if the very thing that makes us the most human, we have evolved away from," said U.S. filmmaker Drake Doremus, who presented his film "Equals" at the festival.

"Equals" shows a futuristic, utopian society where its inhabitants have been bred to be peaceful and emotionless. But a man and a woman discover that they have feelings for one another, and together they attempt to understand this connection.

The love story entitled "L' Hermine" is "romantic and unusual," a cinema critic at Frosinone newspaper, Alfredo Salomone, told Xinhua after watching this film by French director Christian Vincent on Sunday.

In "L' Hermine", a severe and recently divorced French criminal court judge, not very friendly and nicknamed "The Two Figure Judge" because he always hands down sentences of at least 10 years, turns into a middle-aged softie when confronted with a juror he once loved.

While dealing with a major criminal case, the judge falls in love almost in secret with the only woman he has ever loved. "Love is quite a new topic for a film set in a court," said another spectator, Lorenzo Reggiani.

"L' Hermine" has a happy ending. But love can also witness betrayal or violence, as showed in other films presented at the festival earlier this week.

In "Looking for Grace" by Australian director Sue Brooks, a 16-year-old girl runs away from home. In her journey, Grace meets a guy who deceives her and she learns that life is confusing and arbitrary, though wonderful.

Love betrayal is also what turns upside down the life of Tharlo, a Tibetan ethnic shepherd in his forties who lives a quiet life alone in the mountains with his hundreds of sheep before being asked by police to go to the city to have his photo taken for his first ID card.

In this film by Chinese director Pema Tseden, a young and pretty hairdresser shows interest in Tharlo, but she is not serious when talking about traveling together to Lhasa or Beijing and will bring him into a state of confusion and desensitization.

Love can be a source of revenge and violence, as happens in "The Bigger Splash" by Italian director Luca Guadagnino, in which a rock legend is having a holiday on an island with her partner when an old flame unexpectedly arrives with his daughter and interrupts their happiness.

"I envisioned a film about love, beauty, desire, sex, sexuality and the danger of an old lover who by his own presence and actions can trigger destructive behavior and bring back the pasts of our lead characters," Guadagnino said.

"I found "The Bigger Splash" very emotionally strong, I think the director has reached his objective," a spectator, Sharla Ault, told Xinhua after watching the film on Monday.

In "The Endless River" by Cape Town-born director Oliver Hermanus, violence is even capable of generating love between Gilles and Tiny, who come close to each other after losing their dearest ones around the brutal murder of Gilles' family on a South African farm.

Hermanus told reporters that his film explores the relationship between perpetrator and victim, with the two leading characters playing out the dichotomy between innocence and guilt, while slowly falling in love.

"The Danish Girl" is a completely different story, inspired by the real life of Danish painter Einar Wegener, who underwent a series of pioneer operations in the early 1930s to become Lili Elbe, and his wife Gerda.

This film by British director Tom Hooper tells the story of a loving marriage which begins to change one day when Gerda asks her husband to fill in for a model by putting on a dress, and Einar realizes that living his life as a woman is an expression of his truest self.

The couple meet with society's disapproval, yet their love grows as Gerda finds the courage to help her husband become the woman that he really is at heart and to conclude "a story of rare love, a story about putting the other first," American young filmmaker Au Kayee said. Endi