28th august 2008
Yesterday Manoel De Oliveira, who is now centenarian, started the opening Ceremony of the 65th Venice Film Festival in front of a worshipping public who stood applauding Venice – 65th International Film Festival. As the opening ceremony his great work in the cinematographic world.
Soon afterwards the new masterpiece of the Coen Brothers was projected, still they, not being satisfied with the three Oscars they had just won with ‘It is not a country for the old’, present their ‘Burning after reading’, completely changing genre: it is an irreverent bitter and cynical comedy lining up a stellar cast, namely stars bound to become unexpectedly grotesque as they are placed in nearly surrealistic situations. Just not long beforehand, these actors, and particularly Brad Pitt and George Clooney, literally had sent into a frenzy the crown who had been crouched down since the morning out of the Palazzo del Cinema, in order to get their autographs. The Festival has given us a sparkling opening and looks like very interesting despite the fact that there will not be many great stars from Hollywood next days and in spite of the arguments about the temporal closeness to the Rome Festival and Toronto’s one, which represents, according to everybody, the fact causing the shortage of presences. Anyway the programme is rich in films by famous directors, such as ‘Akires to kame’ by Takeshi Kitano, ‘The Perfect Day’ by Opzetek and ‘The Burning plain’, namely the chief work of the scriptwriter of Inarritu, Arriaga. Then there will be Kathryn Bigelow, the African film director Gerima about whom people are already speaking very well, Darren Aronfsky and the Italian Pupi Avati and Pappi Corsicato. In short, it seems that Marco Muller, namely the director of the Festival, has given more importance to the quality of films than to the stars acting a part in them.

Tania Danieli