On the documentary front, there’s already a lot of chatter about Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour Elon Musk documentary, appropriately titled Musk, which will premiere at the festival on September 8. Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, a documentary featuring rare behind-the-scenes footage of hit rock band Oasis and the often feuding brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, premieres on September 5. There’s also the last-minute addition of NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the Oscar-winning filmmakers behind No Other Land. Shot in Tel Aviv at night, the documentary promises to explore the systems behind Israel’s bombing of Gaza, resulting in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. NAZA premieres in competition on September 10.
Plenty of other interesting things are happening outside of competition at Venice as well. Fifty years after Taxi Driver, the seminal movie he penned, Paul Schrader is back with The Basics of Philosophy, a drama about a repressed philosophy professor, which premieres out of competition on September 4. Saoirse Ronan makes her directorial debut with a short film, Paper Plane, which she also wrote herself. And Maggie Gyllenhaal is pulling double duty, serving as president of the festival’s main international jury and also premiering her own short film, Flesh Impact, dedicated to Marilyn Monroe and starring Ellen Burstyn, who’s receiving a lifetime achievement award at the festival.
There’s only one solo female director in the main competition this year at Venice: Danish Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy, whose Woman Unknown premieres on September 6. Barbera says that’s not for a lack of trying. “The absence of films by women in the main competition—you can imagine how hard we searched for films directed by women to include,” he says. “Unfortunately, there just weren’t any.” He has a theory as to why this was the case. “The percentage of films directed by women has dropped this year. Last year it reached over 30%; this year we’re at 24%,” he says. “But I’ve never heard anyone complain during the year that there were too few films produced and directed by women. It’s when festival season rolls around that suddenly this problem is discovered. And then the festival is accused of not having invited films directed by women.”
It’s been almost six years since a film that premiered at a fall film festival took home best picture, with the last movie to do so being Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which premiered at Venice and won the Golden Lion in 2020. But despite the recent drought, Venice still remains a testing ground for awards season as the first official stop on the fall film festival circuit. I’ll be on the ground at Venice, covering the scene at the film festival for Vanity Fair. Check out our live blog to see whether any of the highly anticipated or unexpected titles have what it takes to win the coveted Golden Lion and, perhaps, go all the way.
