ON THIS PAGE:
- Blue Jean
- Casa Susanna
- Las Leonas
BLUE JEAN
United Kingdom, 2022, Director Georgia Oakley, With Rosy McEwen, Lucy Halliday, Kerrie Hayes, Running time 93‘
“Jean is not a heroin,” says Georgia Oakley about the protagonist of her movie (played by Rosy McEwen, she’ll be in Rosemary’s Baby’s prequel, Apartment 7A). Jean is a young gym teacher in Newcastle forced to hide her homosexuality. The year is 1988; we are in England, and the government, run by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, approved a law that equated lesbians, gay and paedophiles as all guilty of misguided lifestyles. Jean shares this misguiding with her partner Viv (Kerrie Hayes), but only during weekends. One day she meets one of her students in a lesbian bar, and this event starts the “psychological drama” of a woman “struggling with her own identity”, explains the director. Oakley starts from the little thoughts that keep us awake at night and ends up talking about homophobia, patriarchy and class conflict.
Mattia Pasquini
CASA SUSANNA
France/USA/UK, 2022. Director Sébastien Lifshitz. Running Time 1h e 37’.
Trans-identity is one of the most crucial topics across Venezia 79 and at the Venice Days. In addition to Roberta Torre’s Le favolose (selected by Notti Veneziane), Venice Days also chose the new feature by French director Sébastien Lifshitz as a special event out of competition. Casa Susanna tells the story of Diane e Kate, two 80 years old women sharing their self-discovery and the experience in the underground collective of cross-dressers that, during the ’50s and ’60s, used to gather in a small wooden house with a barn at the base of Catskills Mountains, in the rural area of the state of New York. Lifshitz explores once more LGBTQ+ culture that was already the focus of many of his works, such as Presque Rien (2000), Wild Side (2004, awarded at Berlinale), Les invisibles (2012, César for Best Documentary), and Les vies de Thérèse (Queer Palm at Cannes 2016). Among the director’s most recent works are the documentaries Adolescentes (2019) and Petite fille (2020).
Emanuele Bucci
LAS LEONAS
Italy, 2022, Director Isabel Achával e Chiara Bondì, With Abdellah El Hajjouji , Aicha Tebbae, Antoine Reinartz, Running time 80′
There’s also a smiling Nanni Moretti in this female-driven sports story chosen for one of the events of Notti Veneziane teaming up with Isola Edipo. Isabel Achával and Chiara Bondì follow a group of South-American women in Rome. They are caregivers and housekeepers, and they are also a football team running for Las Leonas Cup. Their stories and hopes intertwine in this feature with a ‘Latin heart’. These women dance and smile on screen, but the actual protagonists of the movie are the “Leonas, ” who tell the contrast of hard work, the loneliness of living in a foreign country far from their families, and the adrenaline and the stamina that arise playing football “. The freedom and joy of the match transform the football field into a place of social redemption hard to find elsewhere.
Mattia Pasquini
