American cinema has secured a pre-eminent position in the line-up of the 2016 Venice film festival, with new films from Terrence Malick, Tom Ford, Damien Chazelle and Derek Cianfrance among the highlights of the competition that was announced on Thursday.
Arguably the most eye-catching film in the festival, Chazelle’s Hollywood musical La La Land starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone had already been announced as Venice’s opening film, and it will be joined on the Lido by five other major US productions.
The Light Between Oceans, directed by Cianfrance and adapted from ML Stedman’s novel about a lighthouse keeper who discovers a baby adrift in a lifeboat, features Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in the lead roles.
Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is the fashion-world magnate’s follow-up to 2008’s A Single Man, and is another literary adaptation – of Tony and Susan by Austin Wright – and stars Amy Adams as a woman sent a manuscript of a novel by her ex-husband.
Also selected for competition is Arrival, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s first film since scoring a commercial and critical smash with Sicario. Arrival is a science fiction drama centring on a language expert played by Adams, who is part of the team assigned to investigate mysterious alien spacecraft that have landed on Earth.
Venice has also picked The Bad Batch, the second film by Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour. Described as “a cannibal love story set in a post-apocalyptic Texan wasteland”, The Bad Batch follows her impressive debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
Natalie Portman’s Jackie Kennedy biopic has also been given a competition berth: directed by Chile’s Pablo Larraín, it follows Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. Hacksaw Ridge, billed as Mel Gibson’s comeback film, will play in an out-of competition slot; starring Andrew Garfield, it chronicles the life of conscientious objector Desmond Doss, who won the Medal of Honour during the second world war as an army medic.
And the Magnificent Seven remake, directed by Antoine Fuqua, will play as the festival’s closing film after its premiere at Toronto, which slightly overlaps Venice.
The appearance of Malick’s documentary Voyage of Time in the line-up appears to mark the end of a tortuous saga for the film. Originally conceived by Malick in the 1970s as an exploration of the origins of life on Earth, the director worked sporadically on it over the ensuing decades, with elements of it showing up in the Palme d’Or winning The Tree of Life. However, a lawsuit was launched in 2013 by one of the film’s financiers, who alleged Malick had “forgotten” about the film, and used the funds on other projects.
The suit was eventually settled in 2014, and two versions are thought to have been completed: an Imax format with narration by Brad Pitt, and a more conventional 35mm with Cate Blanchett. Venice will be showing the Blanchett version.
The festival has also found room for a number of other major figures: Emir Kusturica will appear in the competition with On the Milky Road, in which the director stars opposite Monica Bellucci in a three-part study of a turbulent life; veteran Russian auteur Andrei Konchalovsky brings Ray (aka Paradise), an account of three disparate figures during the second world war, and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez from German director Wim Wenders, an adaptation of Peter Handke’s philosophical play.
British cinema will make limited impact at Venice, with the Nick Hamm-directed The Journey – revolving around the friendship between previously-implacable enemies Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, showing in an out-of-competition slot, and Alice Lowe’s “pregnancy horror” film Prevenge picked as the opening film for the Venice Days sidebar.
The Venice film festival opens on 31 August and runs until 10 September.
