It was the most awaited diva at the Venice Film Festival and did not disappoint: Julia Roberts, for the first time at the Lido with a film, “After the Hunt” by Luca Guadagnino (out of competition) on his long day among photographers, journalists and fans showed charisma, class, a professionalism from Hollywood’s “militant” and a touch of humor. In the film, which also tackles the theme of #Metoo, the star is Alma, an esteemed teacher of Philosophy in Yale who finds himself facing a trauma and some choices of the past, when a colleague and dear friend, Henrik (Andrew Garfield), is accused of sexual harassment by a student, Maggie (Ayo Edibiri), one of the most brilliant students of Alma. To those who ask the Oscar -winning diva if you think the film will create disputes and will be considered politically incorrect, she answers with irony: “I love soft questions early in the morning. I don’t know if there will be controversy and disputes for the film, but we challenge people to be passionate about, get angry too. We do not make declarations, we share the lives of these characters. losing the art of conversation in our time ».
Then on the red carpet (delayed for rain) space for glamor. It arrives in a long blue dress with optical motifs and the dazzling smile of ordinance; Surrounded by three bodyguards of the body lends itself to sign some autographs and take some photos with the many people waiting, and then gathered in earnings (in cream jacket with small flowers) and the rest of the cast. Among the faces of Hollywood guests at the projection, also the actress Monica Barbaro (named for the Oscar this year for A Complete Unknown), partner of Garfield, who parades separately by the actor. The competition also reported to current affairs, with two titles that explore the world of work from very different perspectives. The Korean director Park Chan-Wook, returning to the race in Venice twenty years after “Lady revenge”, with “No Other Choice” signs a new adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s novel “The Ax”. In the center there is a forty-year-old manager of a paper mill, Man-Soo (the Lee Byung-Hun of ‘Squid Gamè), who lost his place after two years of unemployment. Thus, desperate, convinced that he obtains a new job suitable for his ambitions, he decides to eliminate all possible competitors. Instead Valerie Donzelli in à Pied d’Uvre, taken from the autobiographical bestseller of Franck Courtès, follows the protagonist (Bastien Bouillon), a photographer, also of a certain success, separated from his wife (Virginie Ledoyen) and with two old children who live far away, who at a certain point leaves everything to devote themselves to writing alone. “In France there are eleven million poor people – explained Courtes – I certainly impoverished myself because I wanted to write, but the story that I want to make it clear is that of the algorithms in which there is no union that holds and in which there is a cynical system that does not allow any solidarity. We find ourselves isolated according to the algorithms, you accept anything against everyone ».
A return is also that of the documentary maker Laura Poitras, lion d’oro in 2022 with all the beauty and pain – All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. This time (codirigando with Mark Oberhaus), in cover-up (out of competition) he focused the goal on one of the greatest American investigation journalists, Seymour M. Hersh, who arrived at Lido together with the two authors. The idea of telling it came to her in 2005, “when I found in Sy’s work one of the rare exceptions, compared to the failure of mainstream journalism in telling what really happened. I felt like this in 2005, and I try the same thing today, while we witness the catastrophe of Gaza, the inability of the mainstream press to tell it exhaustively “, he underlines. And just what happens in the Middle East will resum the scene to the exhibition tomorrow, with the event that promises to combine hundreds of signatures of associations and personalities from the world of cinema.