Superpowers at Venezia 78. Gabriele Mainetti’s Freaks Out underdogs are not the only different superheroes in this festival. There’s also Kate Hudson in Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon. The main character is a woman with paranormal abilities and she escaped from the asylum where she was confined. This run will take her to New Orleans, where she will have to survive also thanks to her power. Amirpour is aiming high after her previous visit to Lido in 2016, when she won the Jury Special Award for The Bad Batch, a tough and irreverent allegory of America in crisis inhabited by cannibal posses and ambiguous gurus in post apocalyptic Texas turned into human dump. Amirpour’s first feature was A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2013) in which she defines an «Iranian spaghetti western iraniano with vampires». The film is played in Persian but is filled with western pop culture, shot in an expressionist black and white and set in an imaginary degraded and alienating town called Bad City. Amirpour’s poetry was crystal clear yet: postmodern contamination of genres and traditions and female underdogs.
In the meantime she also directed some episodes of series such as Legion, Castle Rock, The Twilight Zone. She worked with Keanu Reeves and Jason Momoa for The Bad Batch and Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon stars Jeon Jong-seo (Burning), Kate Hudson (Golden Globe for Almost Famous) and Craig Robinson (The Office, Ghosted, Songbird). Quoting Alberto Barbera, Venice Film Festival Artistic Director, «a surprising, funky and full of colours tale» for a rising filmmaker. After the Golden Palm for Titane, Mona Lisa can become the next big thing.
