Everest (2015)In its 72nd annual edition, the Venice Film Festival gets off to a very British start on Wednesday evening with the world premiere of Everest. With an impressive cast including Jason Clarke, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley, John Hawkes, Josh Brolin, Emily Watson and Robin Wright, this real-life adventure drama from Working Title Films details a disastrous 2006 attempt on the Himalayan summit. It’s an auspicious slot for this US-UK co-production, following two recent Venice openers – Gravity in 2013 and Birdman in 2014 – that were successfully springboarded to later awards-season glory.
One British film is in the main competition this year. The Danish Girl is the new film from Tom Hooper, himself no stranger to awards ceremonies following the multiply garlanded The King’s Speech (2010) and Les Misérables (2012). Hooper’s latest is set in 1920s Copenhagen and stars Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander in the story of the first known case of gender reassignment. It premieres at Venice ahead of a subsequent outing at the Toronto Film Festival, and is then due for release in the UK in January 2016.
Airing in Horizons, the festival’s competitive strand showcasing latest international trends, is Brady Corbet’s The Childhood of a Leader, loosely based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s story of the early years of a Fascist leader during the First World War. Robert Pattinson and Bérénice Bejo star in a European co-production that’s been shot in both English and French language versions.
Screening as part of the International Critics’ Week is Light Years, a debut feature from Esther May Campbell, director of the BAFTA-winning short film September (2007) and TV dramas including Wallander. Backed by the BFI, Campbell’s impressionistic film follows a day in the life of three children missing the influence of their absent mother. It’s the latest from the Newcastle-based production company Third Films, who return to Venice the year after two of their films – Blood Cells and Bypass – premiered at the festival. UK audiences will get their first chance to see Light Years when it plays as part of the First Feature Competition at this year’s BFI London Film Festival.
The festival’s Critics’ Week sidebar for debut films will also be honouring British actor-director Peter Mullan with a special screening of his 1997 drama Orphans, which has been selected by organisers as the best film ever to screen in the section’s 30-year history.
There are more vintage British pleasures to be found in the Venice Classics strand, where a restored version of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is set to stun all over again on the big screen.
Rounding off the British selection at Venice is Innocence of Memories: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum and Istanbul, a collaboration between director Grant Gee (Patience: After Sebald) and prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk which promises a Pamuk-narrated tour of the precious objects in an Istanbul museum. Gee’s documentary, which received funding from the BFI, will gets its world premiere in the festival’s autonomous Venice Days programme.
