In addition to the official competition, the Venice Film Festival also offers other selections. The equivalent of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes is called the Giornate Degli Autori. Here is the 2022 selection:
COMPETITION
BENTU
from Salvatore Mereu
screenwriter: Salvatore Mereu
Raphael has just harvested his small pile of grain that will be a whole year’s supply. Not to be found unprepared, he has been sleeping in the country for days, away from everyone, waiting for the wind to come and help him finally separate the grains from the straw. But the wind doesn’t want to show up. Only Angelino comes to visit him every day to make him feel less lonely. Someday, perhaps, when he grows up, Raphael can lend him his untamed mare and he can finally ride her. But Angelino doesn’t want to wait.
BĚŽNÁ SELHÁNÍ (ORDINARY FAILURES)
from Cristina Groșan
screenwriter: Klára Vlasáková
A misfit teenager, an anxious mother, a recently widowed woman. Their day is suddenly interrupted by a mysterious natural phenomenon. As their world descends into chaos, the three women struggle to find their place in life.
BLUE JEAN
from Georgia Oakley
screenwriter: Georgia Oakley
The year is 1988. The Thatcher government has just passed a law equating lesbians and gays with pedophiles, all of whom are absurdly homologated to a « deviant » lifestyle. Physical education teachers become the main target of these homophobic accusations. And so Jean is forced to lead a double life. During the week she is a fully integrated member of the teaching staff; on weekends, however, she stealthily frequents Newcastle’s gay scene with her girlfriend Viv. When she meets one of her students in a lesbian bar, however, Jean will try to protect not only her work but also her mental condition.
DIRTY DIFFICULT DANGEROUS
Opening Film
from Wissam Charaf
screenwriter: Wissam Charaf, Mariette Désert, Hala Dabaji
Beirut. Lebanon. Today. Ahmed, a Syrian refugee, and Mehdia, an Ethiopian immigrant working as a maid, experience an underground love affair of furtive kissing on the streets of Beirut. While Mehdia tries to break free from her employers, Ahmed, suffering from a mysterious illness, makes a living selling recycled metals. Their story has no future, but they have nothing to lose. So they decide to flee in a desperate search for a better life. Meanwhile, Ahmed’s condition begins to deteriorate.
EL AKHIRA. LA DERNIÈRE REINE
from Adela Bendemerad, Damien Ounouri
screenwriter: Adilla Bendemerad, Damien Ounouri
Algeria, 1516. Pirate Aroudj Barbarossa frees Algiers from Spanish tyranny and seizes power. Word on the street is that, despite the alliance pact made, he killed King Salim Toumi. Incredibly, it is a woman who opposes the course of events: queen Zaphira. Between history and legend, Zaphira’s exploits are symbolic of a personal and political challenge and travail faced for the good of Algiers.
LES DAMNÉS NE PLEURENT PAS
from Fyzal Boulifa
screenwriter: Fyzal Boulifa
Fatima-Zahra and her teenage son Selim move from place to place, always trying to escape the latest scandal in which her mother is involved. When Selim discovers the truth about her past, she vows to start over. Arriving in Tangier, new opportunities loom and, at last, it seems that both of their dreams may come true. But even then, the love that unites them will continue to be extremely fragile.
LOBO E CÃO
from Cláudea Varejão
screenwriter: Cláudea Varejão
Ana was born on an island. She is the second of three children and, along with her siblings, lives with her mother and grandmother. As she grows up, she understands that girls and boys are assigned different tasks. Luís, her best friend, likes to wear women’s and men’s clothes. And Ana admires him. From Canada comes Cloé and, with her, a breath of youth. And so, with her friend, Ana embarks to cross the horizon and to discover that line that separates the « wolf » from the « dog » and that might reveal to her which sea to sail.
PADRE PIO
from Abel Ferrara
screenwriter: Abel Ferrara, Maurizio Braucci
It is the end of World War I and young Italian soldiers return to San Giovanni Rotondo, a poor, violent land over which the church and wealthy landowners exercise unchallenged dominance. The families are desperate, the men, though victorious, appear broken. Padre Pio also arrives, in a remote Capuchin monastery, to begin his ministry, evoking a charismatic aura with holiness and epic visions of Jesus, Mary and the Devil. The eve of Italy’s first free elections sets the stage for a real and metaphorical massacre, an apocalyptic event that will change the course of history.
STONEWALLING
de Huang Ji, Ryuji Otsuka
screenwriter: Huang Ji, Ryuji Otsuka
Twenty-year-old Lynn is advised to learn English, attend flight attendant school, and be more determined. Everything changes abruptly when she discovers she is pregnant. Undecided about what to do and without much time to spare, she tells her boyfriend that she has an abortion and then returns to her parents who are always quarreling and with their traditional medicine clinic in a precarious condition, to figure out, assuming it is possible, what direction to take.
THE LISTENER
Closing Film – Out of competition
from Steve Buscemi
screenwriter: Alessandro Camon
Beth is a volunteer working for a helpline. She is part of that small army in the U.S. that takes phone calls every night from very different people who are lonely, broken, hopeless. Over the past year, the wave has turned into a tsunami. It is Beth’s turn again, and the stakes rise each time: is this the night she will lose someone? Or will she succeed in saving the one who called her? In the end, Beth will also tell her story and her motivations. In the film, we are always beside her: listening, comforting, understanding, piecing together the world one piece at a time.
THE MAIDEN
from Graham Foy
screenwriter: Graham Foy
A perfect summer day ends in tragedy, and so three suburban teens forge a kind of otherworldly bond. Colton and Kyle are best friends and skim the water’s edge, sharing dreams and spray-painting the river’s gorge. Whitney also explores that gorge and seeks solace by writing and drawing in her journal. But when she is abandoned by her best friend, Whitney disappears. The boys are surrounded by beauty and natural wonders, yet darkness and death loom. The discovery of Whitney’s diary transports us into a world of mirrors. A magical gorge. A paranormal encounter. And then the return of a dead black cat. Is this a dream? Is it the afterlife? And once we are deeply connected, can we consider ourselves truly alone?
Special Event
ACQUA E ANICE
from Corrado Ceron
screenwriter: Federico Fava, Corrado Ceron avec la collaboration de Valentina Zanella
Water and Aniseed is a « dance hall road movie » that tells the story of Olimpia, a ballroom dancing legend who, at seventy years of age, decides to put her orchestra’s van back on the road: this time, however, it is not to go on tour, but to embark on a journey from the people who loved her and to the places that made her a star. With her is a shy and awkward young woman, Maria, just hired to be her driver.
ALONE
screenwriter Jafar Najafi
Amir is a fourteen-year-old boy living in a village. After the death of his father, he is the one who takes care of his mother and 12-year-old twin sisters, Marzieh and Razieh. It is to the two of them that much of his attention is devoted as he tries to untie them from the shackles of tradition.
CASA SUSANNA
screenwriter Sébastien Lifshitz
In the 1950s and 1960s, in the rural United States in the foothills of the Catskills, stood a small wooden house with a barn behind it that housed the first underground transvestite network. Diane and Kate are in their eighties today. They were men at the time and part of this secret organization. In the film they tell this essential but forgotten chapter in the affirmation of trans identities. It is a noisy story, filled with fury, filled with extraordinary characters, including the famous Susanna, who had the courage to create this shelter that became known as Susanna House.
MARCIA SU ROMA
from Mark Cousins
screenwriter: Mark Cousins, Tony Saccucci
Using rare archival material and his characteristic narrative style, Mark Cousins chronicles the rise of fascism in Italy and its expansion into Europe in the 1930s. In March on Rome, which is both an essay film and a historical document, the director contextualizes history by looking at the contemporary world, showing a political landscape today characterized by a disturbing far right and a manipulative use of the media.
SIAMO QUI PER PROVARE
from Greta De Lazzaris, Jacopo Quadri
Daria is getting married, Antonio is best man. They are an artistic couple. They have lived in the same building for years, now she moves to another neighborhood. They start working on a new project inspired by Federico Fellini’s Ginger and Fred. With them are Emanuele, Monica, Francesco, Martina, and Andrea. It starts with tap dancing lessons, the dramaturgy is written day by day, rehearsing in theaters emptied by the pandemic, in Rome, Rimini and France. Amidst doubts, in creative euphoria, our actors end up looking more and more like a group of castaways, in a disorientation where they are constantly mixing real life with the play that is perhaps taking shape.