Photo credit: Leone Rosso (from the La Biennale di Venezia website)
The prestigious Venice International Film Festival has made a name for itself as the premiere launchpad of Hollywood movies.
In past years, the festival has premiered Damien Chazelle's La La Land and First Man, Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, George Clooney's Suburbicon, and Darren Aronofsky's mother!
This year, the festival will show James Gray's Ad Astra, starring Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones; Steven Soderbergh's Netflix film The Laundromat, starring Meryl Streep and Gary Oldman; Noah Baumbach's Netflix film Marriage Story, starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson; and Todd Phillips' Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix; and Roman Polanski's An Officer and a Spy. (As an aside, Ad Astra and Joker will be theatrically released in Singapore on 19 September and 3 October respectively.)
The festival will open with Palme d'Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda's first French-language film, The Truth. The film boasts a star-studded international cast comprising Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, and Ethan Hawke.
Swedish director Roy Andersson, who won the Golden Lion at the festival in 2014 with his absurdist comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, returns to the festival with his latest film About Endlessness.
Sixth Generation Chinese director Lou Ye, whose 2014 film Blind Massage won the Golden Horse Best Film, returns to Venice for the second time with Saturday Fiction, a black-and-white period thriller starring Gong Li, Mark Chao, and Joe Odagiri.
Amidst talk of women representation in film festivals, the festival disappointed many when it is revealed that only two films directed by women were selected for Competition. The two films are Australian director Shannon Murphy's Babyteeth and Saudi Arabian director Haifaa al-Mansour's The Perfect Candidate.
The Competition line-up also has award-winning French director Olivier Assayas' Wasp Network, which stars Penélope Cruz, and Colombian director Ciro Guerra's first English-language film Waiting for the Barbarians, which stars Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson. Assayas won the Best Director award at Cannes Film Festival in 2016 for Personal Shopper while Guerra's past two films, Embrace of the Serpent and Birds of Passage, were critically acclaimed at Cannes Film Festival.
All films selected for Competition are eligible for the festival's top prize, the Golden Lion, which has previously been won by Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Ang Lee.
The Venice Film Festival will run from 28 August to 7 September 2019.