ON THIS PAGE:
- Kora
- Sudan Souviens
- The Antique case
Kora
Kora
Portugal, 2024. Directed by Cláudia Varejão. Starring Inna Klochko, Lana Alkouse, Margarita Sharapova, Norina Sohail, Zohra Ghadr Alzaman. Running time 28′
‘We are experiencing an unprecedented human tragedy. We have failed as a species and as a society. As a human being and filmmaker, I feel responsible,’ says Clàudia Varejao, already a winner at Venice Days in 2022 (with Lobo e Cão), where she returns with a short film about refugee women living in Portugal. Women who carry their past with them, in their memories and photos as in their bodies, oppose the uncertainty surrounding them and perhaps awaiting them. ‘Every day, people are driven out of their homes and countries because of armed conflicts and human rights violations. Many of them lose parents, children, their daily lives,’ the director explains. – Kora was born out of this feeling of being too small and the frustration of being part of something that does not represent me. It is my political and emotional view of the historical moment I am living’.
Emanuele Bucci
Soudan, souviens-toi
by Hind Meddeb
France, Tunisia, Qatar, 2024, 76′, colour
Screenplay: Hind Meddeb – Sala Perla
Director Hind Meddeb, who, during the Arab Spring, had directed Tunisia Clash and Electro Chaabi, this time followed the Sudanese twenty-somethings Shajane, Maha, Muzamil, Khattab during their 57-day sit-in in Khartoum, in front of the army headquarters, until the massacre on 3 June 2019, when the military attacked the protesters, killing hundreds of people, and the beginning of the war, which forced them all to take the road to exile. A choral film in which the collective portrait of a generation fighting for freedom emerges with poems and songs.’ Sudan is at the crossroads of worlds I have frequented since childhood,’ explained the director.’ My parents left North Africa in the 1970s to seek freedom in Europe. This film is about the impossible attempt to change. Faced with a powerful army, how can a peaceful movement make its voice heard?’.
Tiziana Leone
The Antique case: press conference on the Suspanded Gda film
It should have been the day of The Antique by Rusudan Glurjidze, in competition at Venice Days. But it won’t. The film’s co-producers (Russian Viva Film, Croatian Avantura and Cypriot Pygmalion) have obtained an emergency decree from the Venice Court of Justice to stop the movie because of a dispute over screenplay copyright. The measure led the Venice Days, in agreement with the Biennale, to suspend screenings for the time being. Anyway, the film will be presented, in the presence of the director, during the 3 pm press conference at the Casa degli Autori. The case is causing debate, and some see in the minority producers’ objection censorship aims towards a film polemic against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The film is set in St. Petersburg during the mass deportations of Georgians by the Moscow government in 2006. The Venice Days emphasised that they wanted to do ‘everything possible, respecting the law, but also the expressive freedom of the author, to support the very existence of the work and its visibility in Venice in the coming days’.
Emanuele Bucci
