The 79th Venice Film Festival will be taking place from 31st August to 10th September and is one of the highlights of the year for the film and screen industries. We are thrilled that the achievements of our alumni and staff have been recognised.
We’re delighted to share that Living, the film by LFS alumnus, Oliver Hermanus has been selected to be screened non-competitively. The British-set remake of the Akira Kurosawa classic Ikiru, stars Bill Nighy as a 1950s bureaucrat who discovers he is terminally ill, using a script from acclaimed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. It was an LFS team effort as LFS Honorary Associate, Elizabeth Karlsen, known for Carol (2015) and The Crying Game (1992), also worked on the project as Producer
Living premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in January and so marks a change in the Venice Film Festival's usual rule that all titles eligible for selection must be world premieres. The film will be showing alongside features by filmmakers including Olivia Wilde in the fiction category. The screening of Living marks Oliver’s return to Venice following his premier of The Endless River in 2015 where he competed for the Golden Lion.
The accolades for LFS alumni continue as Director, Roberto De Paolis who studied at LFS in 2000 will be premiering Princess at Venice Film Festival. Princess is the second feature film by the Roman director and follows a young, illegal Nigerian immigrant who works on the outskirts of a major city. Roberto debuted his work in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 2017 with his first feature, Pure Hearts, is set to open Venice's Horizons section this year.
We’re also hugely proud too that Hanging Gardens has been recognised in the Horizons Extra category, having been co-produced and co-written by LFS tutor and Visiting Lecturer, Margaret Glover. The new category of the festival is dedicated to more offbeat works of all genres with no length constraints, focussing on new trends in world cinema.
Screenings of all the Horizons Extra films will be followed by onstage conversations with the directors, writers and actors, moderated by writer and arts journalist Chiara Tagliaferri.
Images (from top):
Still from Living (Dir: Oliver Hermanus, DoP: Jamie Ramsay)
Still from Princess (Roberto De Paolis, DoP: Claudio Cofrancesco)
Still from Hanging Gardens (dir: Ahmed Yassin Al Daradji, DoP: Duraid Munajim)