ON THIS PAGE:
- Stranger Eyes by Siew Hua Yeo
- April by Dea Kulumbegashvili
Stranger Eyes (Mò shì lù)
Singapore, Taipei, France, USA. 2024 Director Siew Hua Yeo Cast Wu Chien-Ho, Lee Kang-Sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen, Pete Teo, Xenia Tan, Maryanne Ng-Yew Running time 125′
A Singaporean film competes at the Venice International Film Festival for the first time. The director is Siew Hua Yeo, known for winning the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2018 with his second film, A Land Imagined, who now presents a thriller entitled Stranger Eyes (Mò shì lù). Starring in the murder mystery, which finds its trigger in surveillance cameras, are two acclaimed Taiwanese actors, Lee Kang-Sheng and Wu Chien-Ho. Wu plays Darren, a young father whose infant daughter has been missing for two years, when he receives some mysterious footage of her intimate family life. Darren suspects that his neighbour Goh, played by Lee, is the voyeur linked to his daughter’s disappearance and decides to start spying on him, but he does not realise that this will lead him to a chilling confrontation with himself. According to the director, Stranger Eyes explores the concept of being spied on, ‘it is about how we see others, how they look at us and how we perceive ourselves to be seen’. Artistic director Alberto Barbera presents it as ‘A layered work that lends itself to multiple readings, a metalinguistic excursion into cinema, in which one can hear the echoes of Hitchcock’s films, in particular Rear Window (1954), but also the denunciation of a country under the eye of surveillance cameras and finally a reflection on the notion of family. A work is more complex than it appears at first glance, beyond what is a well-oiled detective story mechanism about truth and lies.
Vania Amitrano
April
Venice 81 – Competition
Georgia/France/Italy, 2024. Director Dea Kulumbegashvili. Starring Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze. Running time 2h 14′
The Venice 81 competition is also an opportunity to discover how the path of new voices in world cinema that have recently emerged with acclaimed debut works continues. It is the case of Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili, who brings her second fiction feature, April, to the Lido after having triumphed with her previous film Beginning at the 2020 San Sebastián Film Festival, winning the Golden Shell for Best Film, the Silver Shell for the director and the Silver Shell for the lead actress Ia Sukhitashvili, as well as the Jury Prize for the screenplay. In that powerful debut, the filmmaker took us to a small town in Georgia dominated by religious intolerance and patriarchal violence, narrating, Kulumbegashvili explains, ‘a woman’s journey to accept herself, despite the infinite abyss she faces’.
The style is both dry and evocative, between long fixed shots (rendering the protagonist’s sense of imprisonment well) and moments of transcendence that make one think of Bresson. April’s (in which we find the same actress as in Beginning) is another story immersed in the contradictions of the filmmaker’s home country, where the termination of pregnancy is still a crime. At the centre is the midwife, Nina, who performs abortions clandestinely to help patients who are forbidden to decide on their bodies. A theme, the latter, is still very topical and frequented by cinema. Just think of the 2021 Golden Lion winner L’événement.
Emanuele Bucci
