Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu comes back to Venice Film Festival for the fourth time. His first appearance was in 2002 with the collective work alla Mostra Internazionale di Cinema di Venezia, che lo aveva già accolto in passato per il collettivo 9/11/2001. The year after was in competition with 21 Grams and then in 2015 with Birdman, the film that started its lucky path from Lido to Oscars, winning four awards including best picture. Thgeres another come back, because the director sets Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades in his birthplae, Ciudad de Mexico, where he shot last time in 2000 Amores Perros. Iñárritu says that “we have never seen Mexico City like this”.
Alfonso Cuarón did something similar. He came to Venice in 2001 with Y tu mamá también. He won the Gold Lion in 2018 with Roma that later won three Oscars (including Best Picture). The film was shot in the area of the former Distrito Federal. A promising precedence for Iñárritu, who was careless of superstitions and expectations and gathered in his team the artistic designer Eugenio Caballero (he won an Oscar for Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth) and other professionals from Roma’s crew to start a new Oscar campaign and invade Mexico City, from Castillo de Chapultepec to El Zocalo, with green or orange-haired girls, helmets and workers with jacket and tie.
Daniel Giménez Cacho is a well-known Mexican journalist and director of documentaries. He returns to his land of birth to face an existential crisis, clean up every doubt about himself and his family relationships, balancing between a shaded past and a country that offers him a new reality. A journey already defined as “epic” and will probably reveal much about the filmmaker who worked on this project for five years.
The temporary title (“Limbo”) and the continuous reference to the movie being “a fantasy” presage something more complex than the promised nostalgic comedy. Anyway, it will be a surprise. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu said to Alberto Barbera to have changed his way of dreaming after starting working on this movie that will be for sure “his most personal film, he put all of himself in it, his obsessions, his dreams and his nightmares”. “Dreams are real, just like cinema, but both are not true… Bardo is the chronicle of this journey between two illusions with unreadable boundaries,” the director said. “I’ve never worked like this in my life, and I don’t think I will do it again”.
BARDO
Venezia 79 – Concorso
Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades
Mexico, 2022, Director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, With Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sanchez Solano, Andrés Almeida, Francisco Rubio, Running time 174′
