Separated
USA/Mexico, 2024. Directed by Errol Morris. Running time 93′
Not that it was anything new in the management of illegal migration flows from Mexico to the United States, but during the previous Trump administration, the practice of family separation increased, at least until June 2018. A procedure that, in the name of the zero-tolerance desired by the Republican President, came to take thousands of children away from their parents, affecting around 8,000 families from 2017 onwards, according to US government data cited by Amnesty. This violence today conquers the screen and comes to the Venice International Film Festival audience thanks to Errol Morris’ documentary Separated. Out of competition, for the third time (after presenting the six episodes of the miniseries Wormwood starring Peter Sarsgaard in 2017 and the 2018 doc American Dharma about Steve Bannon, as well as The Unknown Known in competition in 2013), the winner of the 2004 Academy Award category – for the documentary The Fog of War – The War According to Robert McNamara – is inspired by the best-seller ‘Separated: An American Tragedy‘ by Jacob Soboroff, who was involved as screenwriter and executive producer. ‘Tackling the issue of separated families at the border is particularly timely and urgent,’ said Submarine co-chair Josh Braun of the director’s work, who said of his film that he wanted to examine “the nightmare that these policies have produced” and that he shot certain scenes to ‘make us think about the nature of what could have happened.’ That confirms the focus on the candidate in the upcoming presidential election, who was also the protagonist of one of his never-realised projects, The Movie Movie, in which he imagined Donald Trump himself acting in Citizen Kane in an alternative universe.
Mattia Pasquini
Leopardi – The Poet of Infinity (part 1 and 2)
‘After Martone, Rubini too measures himself with the figure of one of Italy’s greatest philosophers and poets’. This is how Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera announced the presentation Leopardi – Il poeta dell’infinito (Leopardi – The Poet of the Infinite) among the Special Events Out of Competition. Directed by Sergio Rubini, already the author of I fratelli De Filippo (2021), the two-part miniseries gives an unprecedented but historically accurate portrait of Giacomo Leopardi, starting from his adolescence with his exceptional education in Recanati, up to his friendship with Antonio Ranieri and his obsession with the seductive Fanny, who represented the object of his desire and the source of inspiration for his poetry. The miniseries, written by Rubini with Carla Cavalluzzi and Angelo Pasquini, will be aired on Rai 1 in December 2024 and stars Leonardo Maltese as Leopardi, Cristiano Caccamo as his friend Ranieri, Giusy Buscemi as Fanny Targioni Tozzetti and Alessio Boni as Giacomo Leopardi’s father. Leopardi – Il poeta dell’infinito ‘required a large production investment whose strong points are the accurate historical reconstruction and the important cast,’ Barbera further explains. It is the story of a great poet who defied his time, a formidable genius capable of creating verses of sublime enchantment and passion and writings charged with particularly significant political and human ideals. The miniseries follows Leopardi’s journey between impulses and defeats, mainly due to his precarious health, through the various stages of his life that took him to Florence, Milan, Bologna, Rome up to Naples, where he eventually died, against the backdrop of the tumultuous Italy of the early 19th century.
Vania Amitrano
Riefenstahl
Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most controversial women of the 20th century. German actress, film director and photographer, achieved notoriety during the Nazi regime with her best-known films, The Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938). At the 81st Venice International Film Festival, Andres Veiel (Black Box BRD, 2001) presents Out of Competition Riefenstahl. This documentary investigates the history and legacy of an ambiguous artist and an aspect of her aesthetic language that is dangerously topical. ‘Now as then, Leni Riefenstahl’s visual worlds revolve around the theme of triumph. The triumph over doubts, over ambivalence, over what are considered imperfections and weaknesses,’ explains Veiel.’ Observing today’s world, making a film about Riefenstahl presented itself as a natural, pressing need. Riefenstahl’s legacy, reinterpreted in the light of her private writings and documents, offers a new perspective on the fascination with the majesty of the Third Reich and the need to glorify perfect, victorious and muscular bodies. This need is resurfacing strongly in our society today’. Although bound to Adolf Hitler by friendship and esteem, Riefenstahl was never a member of the Nazi Party, but she shared and propagated its aesthetics. Using documents from Riefenstahl’s estate, including private footage, photos, recordings and letters, Veiel’s film questions her visual language, which celebrates perfection and power and scorns all forms of weakness, placing it in a precise historical context and then extrapolating reflections on a present that once again risks harking back to those same ideals of the past.
Vania Amitrano
