Venice Film Festival opens for 72th time

The first film shown at the Venice film biennale on Wednesday was the British-produced "Everest," featuring an Anglo-American cast including Jake Gyllenhaal, Keira Knightley and Josh Brolin. The out-of-competition mountaineering thriller began this year's oldest surviving film festival which first opened its doors in 1932.

The $65 million (57 million euro) production won praise for its use of 3D technology to bring the scale of the Himalayas to the screen.

Festival director Alberto Barbera said he hoped "Everest" would have a similar impact to "Gravity," which opened in Venice two years ago and went on to win a number of Oscars, and "Birdman," which opened Venice last year and received international acclaim.

Listed as co-produced or German films in this year's line-up are Aleksandr Sokurov's "Francofonia" a French-German-Dutch co-production, and Canadian director Atom Egoyan's "Remember." Both are entered in the main, international competition of feature films, presented as world premieres at "Venezia 72." Hiwot Admasu Getaneh's "New Eyes" is in the "Orizzonti Short Film" competition. It is a French-British-German co-production.

Franco-German classical pianist, Caroline Haffner, who attended the opening of the festival on Wednesday evening said she was looking forward to seeing Sokurov's film. "I understand it is both a portrait of the Louvre Museum and France's role in supporting the arts," Haffner said. "It's good to have a film looking at art in practice over history."

Egoyan's film "Remember" has Christopher Plummer - co-star with Julie Andrews in the 1965 movie "The Sound of Music" - and 87-year-old TV actor Martin Landau from the "Mission Impossible" series of the 1960s and 70s. The film is set in the US and tells the tale of Zev, who discovers the Nazi guard who murdered his family 70 years before is living in America under an assumed name.

Stars afloat

Johnny Depp is due to visit Venice, La Serenissima for the world premiere of Scott Cooper's "Black Mass" in which he plays Irish-American mobster James 'Whitey' Bulger. British actor Benedict Cumberbatch is also in the cast. Netflix's debut into feature films, "Beasts of No Nations" about child soldiers in Africa, is also due to be screened.

The favored entries for the top prize, the Golden Lion, include Tom Hooper's "The Danish Girl," Sokurov's Francofonia, Luca Guadagnino's "A Bigger Splash" and Charlie Kaufman's "Anomalisa."

Festival director Alberto Barbera said producers no longer made festivals an absolute priority. But he expressed confidence ahead of the event: “I am pretty excited about the lineup, I got 98 percent of the films I wanted. There is no need to hide the fact it is getting more and more difficult, but it is the same for everyone."

The Toronto Film Festival is also held in September and has in recent years taken some of the limelight away from Italy's northern city on the sea, especially in terms of deals and the commercial side of cinema.

Barbera said about Toronto: "I always underline they are two different kinds of festivals; ours is a much smaller festival, and we have a reduced number of films. The purpose in Venice is the quality of the films instead of quantity."

"Hollywood films help raise the interest of the international press, but more and more, I feel festivals are getting back to their original purpose, which was the discovery of new auteurs," Barbera commented.

The festival is organized by La Biennale di Venezia and runs on Venice Lido from September 2 to 12.

jm/msh (AFP, AP)