I’m Still Here by Walter Salles
The 81st edition of the prestigious Venice Film Festival starts tomorrow, August 28, featuring a selection of films by Latin American directors from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Three South American filmmakers—Pablo Larraín from Chile, Walter Salles from Brazil, and Luis Ortega from Argentina—are competing in the main competition for the Golden Lion Award.
Larraín returns to the Golden Lion race for a fourth time—after Post Mortem (2010), Jackie (2016), and El Conde (2023)—with the biographical drama Maria, starring Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, the tumultuous, beautiful and tragic story of the life of the world’s greatest female opera singer, relived and reimagined during her final days in 1970s Paris.
Salles will world premiere his latest film I’m Still Here / Ainda Estou Aqui at Venice. Set in 1971, the film is an adaptation of Marcelo Rubens Paiva's book of the same name, and stars Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro as Eunice Paiva, a mother and activist searching for her missing husband, congressman Rubens Paiva, during the Brazilian Military Dictatorship.
Ortega will compete with Kill the Jockey / Matar al jockey, the story of Remo Manfredini (played by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), the best jockey of his generation, whose addictions and self-destructive behavior, however, have gradually cast a shadow over his glory and threaten his relationship with his girlfriend Abril. The Argentine film also stars Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Giménez Cacho, and Mariana Di Girólamo.
Academy Award-nominated Brazilian director Petra Costa (The Edge of Democracy) will participate out of competition with her latest documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics / Apocalipse nos Trópicos, which investigates Brazil’s descent into religious fundamentalism during the COVID-19 pandemic and President Bolsonaro’s leadership. The documentary portrays a country divided by a holy war with conflicting visions of faith, science, power, and solidarity.
Two South American short films—from Brazil and Guatemala—will be competiting for the Orizzonti Award: My Mother Is a Cow / Minha Mãe é Uma Vaca by Moara Passoni, and James by Andres Rodríguez. My Mother Is a Cow follows a 12-year-old girl who, left in her aunt’s care on a family ranch at the edge of the burning Brazilian wetland, is desperate for the touch of her mother’s love. James tells the story of an indigenous teenager who fights to preserve his happiness and innocence amidst the vastness of the city. As he struggles not to feel abandoned, he begins to realise that forging his own path requires him to trample on others.
Also premiering out of competition in the Non-Fiction sidebar of the Italian festival is Separated, a Mexican co-production and the latest film by acclaimed American documentarian Errol Morris. It addresses the separation of parents and children at the US-Mexico border. Academy Award-winning director Alfonso Cuarón will participate out of competition with the psychological thriller television miniseries Disclaimer, starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline. The series is based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Renée Knight, about a famed documentary journalist who discovers she is a prominent character in a novel that reveals a secret she has tried to keep hidden.
Venice Days, the independent section of the Venice Film Festival, also known as the Giornate degli Autori, will host the world premiere of three Latin American films, all by women directors, in its 21st edition. The three Latin American films are the Colombian documentary Soul of the Desert / Alma del desierto by Mónica Taboada Tapia, the Dominican film Sugar Island by Johanné Gómez Terrero, and the Brazilian film Manas by Marianna Brennand.
Soul of the Desert, screening out of competition in the Special Event program, is a documentary on the road that tracks the journey by Georgina, an elderly transgender woman forced to cross the sandy peninsula Guajira, on foot, to obtain the thing she has desired for almost half a century: a document that will hand her the right to be what she has always felt she was, and will allow her, at long last, to vote.
In Sugar Island, premiering in competition, director Gómez Terrero examines the colonial roots of the sugar industry and the lasting role of spirituality in liberation movements through the story of Makenya, a teenager whose unwanted pregnancy propels her into adulthood. Set on the Island of Marajó in the Amazon rainforest, Manas tells the story of Tielle, a thirteen-year-old girl who rebels against a history of domestic violence and trauma handed down from generation to generation.
The 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival takes place August 26 - September 7, 2024.
