The Venice film festival opens on Wednesday with the Italian big-budget movie “Baari”, a sentimental sweep through the 20th century in Sicily, taking into fascism, war, communism and the Mafia.
Billed as one of the most expensive Italian film ever cost 25 million euros ($ 36 million), the first house, “he made the film to open Venice for about 20 years beginning 11 days of screenings, photo shoots, parties and the glamor of the red carpet at the Lido island.
Director Giuseppe Tornatore, whose 1988 movie “Cinema Paradiso” won an Oscar foreign film, said the story of a poor family living through the upheavals of the last century, is based in part on his own memories of life in Sicily .
He told reporters before the official opening night he wanted to use his birthplace as a microcosm of what was happening in the world.
“It could be anywhere,” he said, speaking through a translator.
“The idea was not to tell the story of Sicily. The idea was to tell the story of a series of characters in the microcosm of a small town, hearing the echoes of what was happening around the city and away from the people,” he added .
And so, Peppino, the central character played by Francesco Scianna, is carried by the communist movement, travels to the Soviet Union, where he knows firsthand what it really means for citizens living there and briefly in France in search of work.
But the landscapes of Sicily and passionate people also play an important role in a sumptuously shot film in the middle of olive trees, steep hills and the ever-changing streets Baari.
Tornatore, recalled the saying that young people should leave Sicily before the 17 to clear the distinctive absorption defects of the island.
“I went to the 27, so it absorbs all the defects of the Sicilian, even those who know nothing.”
Hollywood comes to town
While organizers would appreciate a hit Venice on the Lido Italian home after the movies have generally failed grown in recent years, the festival’s success will be judged, and by the number of Hollywood stars and U.S. films. UU. it attracts.
The early signs are promising, with Matt Damon, Michael Moore, Nicolas Cage, George Clooney, Oliver Stone, Charlize Theron, Eva Mendes, Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone among those expected to walk the red carpet.
The cinema complex at the Lido is being re-built in a 100-million euro makeover designed to tow oldest film festival in the world in the 21st century and help it compete with other festivals, including Toronto , which overlaps.
Damon appears in “The Informant!” The complainant who plays a crooked company, and Moore brings “Capitalism: A Love Story”, a documentary attacking corporate greed and analysis of the recession.
As the economic crisis, the dominant themes of this year’s horror, George Romero, with the presentation of “survival of the dead” and the animation in the form of a lifetime award for “Toy Story” and “Cars “creator John Lasseter.
Clooney, who has a home in Italy and is the local favorite, appears in “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” about a journalist who stumbles across a U.S. military unit in Iraq that employs paranormal powers in their missions.
Post Author Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic world-view in “The Road” reaches the big screen, with Viggo Mortensen stars alongside Theron.
Cage appears in “Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”, a remake of the 1992 film directed by Abel Ferrara, who has publicly criticized the new version.
U.S. Director Todd Solondz is on the main line-up of 23 competition films with “Life During Wartime” while Oliver Stone will be in Venice with his documentary “South of the Border” on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
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