Adaptations of novels and films about current events will be presented at the festival in Venice

Venice (Italy) August 26 - At the film festival in Venice, which starts on Wednesday, adaptations of famous novels, works by well-known directors and films devoted to current events in the world will be presented this year. 21 films will premiere in the main competition until Saturday, September 6, when the main festival prize, the Golden Lion, will be awarded. This year too, the festival will be visited by many well-known actors and filmmakers from Europe and the United States. Two Czech co-production films will be shown in Venice this year.

Directors Guillermo del Toro, who will present his film Frankenstein, and François Ozon with his work L'Étranger, inspired by the novel The Stranger, bet on novel adaptations. Julian Schnabel's detective film In the Hand of Dante, starring, for example, Al Pacino and John Malkovich, also has a strong literary footprint.

The festival and its main competition category will be opened on Wednesday by Paolo Sorrentino's new film La Grazia. Another well-known Italian director, Luca Guadagnino, will present his film Accusation with Julia Roberts, who will be coming to the Venice festival for the first time, outside the main competition. Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly comedy starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler also has a stellar cast. Jude Law will then play Russian President Vladimir Putin in the film Le Mage du Kremlin (The Kremlin Wizard) by Olivier Assayas, which discusses the rise to power of the Russian autocrat.

Even Venice will feel the tremors of the war in the Gaza Strip this year. Shortly before the festival, a group of more than 100 Italian filmmakers called for a strong expression of solidarity with the suffering Palestinians. The main competition will feature the film The Voice of Hind Rajab, about the Israeli attack in the Gaza Strip in which a family of Palestinian civilians was killed. In the video, the girl Hind Rajabova's phone call with the Red Crescent Center during the Israeli shelling is heard.

Russian directors, who were not invited because of the war in Ukraine, are returning to Venice after years. Russian filmmaker Alexandr Sokurov will present his five-hour film Zapisnaja knižka rezisjora (Director's Diary) in Venice.

The press also has great expectations regarding the new film by the Greek director Jorgos Lanthimos Bugonia or the return of the South Korean director Park Chan-uk to Venice after roughly 20 years with the film No Other Choice. Central Europe and its historical traumas will be represented at the festival this year by Hungarian director László Nemes' film Árva (Orphan) from the time of the anti-Soviet uprising in his country.

This year, the festival in Venice will also have a strong selection of documentary films with the film Ghost Elephants (Přízraky slonů) by German director Werner Herzog, who this year together with the American actress with Czech ancestry Kim Novaková will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Italian director Gianfranco Rosi dedicated his film Sotto le nuvole (Under the Clouds) to Naples, while the main character of Laura Poitras' new documentary film Cover-Up (Camouflage) is journalist Seymour Hersh.

In the Horizons section, the Czech-Slovak-Polish co-production The Father by Slovak director Tereza Nvotová will be presented on Wednesday. In the non-competitive Venezia Spotlight section, the film Made in EU, a Czech co-production by Bulgarian director Stefan Komandarev, will premiere.

WT.24