IN QUESTA PAGINA:
- Riget Exodus
- Living
- Bobi Wine: Ghetto President
RIGET EXODUS (THE KINDOM EXODUS)
Denmark. Director Lars Von Trier With Bodil Jørgensen, Mikael Persbrandt, Tuva Novotny, Lars Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro, Alexander Skarsgård Running time 295’. Distribution: Movies Inspired
It’s one of the most awaited events of the 79th Venice Film Festival, not only because it marks the return to Venice of Lars Von Trier but also because no one was hoping to see a third and final season of The Kingdom. But the Danish director is used to surprising everyone, and here’s the last chapter, after almost thirty years from the first one. The Kingdom was produced in 1994, right after David Lynch bravely crossed the border between cinema and television with Twin Peaks. Von Trier’s series is set in the neurological ward of a big Danish hospital, haunted by ghosts and mysterious presence. In this final chapter, the director starts again from the daysleeper Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), looking for answers to unsolved questions to save the hospital from its doomed destiny. Asleep, Karen wanders in the dark until she inexplicably stands in front of the hospital. The old feud between Danish and Swedish is still running while a curse lingers on the Kingdom. «Exodus can effectively mean enter or leave depending on the angle of observation of the line – explained the director – But the word merely means a huge number of people crossing a dotted line painted with a pencil. Why? There’s an unbalance between good and evil. The limit has been reached, at least in The Kingdom, but I cannot assure you that it will be easy and bloodless open the seven astral lockers of the world simultaneously with the blood of the doctor». We’ll discover soon if the director will appear in the end credits as in the previous seasons, where he closed every episode with his jokes.
Tiziana Leone
LIVING
Id., United Kingdom, 2022. Director Oliver Hermanus. With Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke. Running time 1h e 42’.
Oliver Hermanus’s Living is the only film in the official selection that is not a world premiere. This exception has a very valid reason. The movie is a homage to its screenwriter and Nobel winner Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of novels such as The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005). The British writer is one of the jurors of the international competition. But this is not the only exciting thing about Living, an ambitious remake of the 1952 masterpiece directed by Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, winner of the Golden Lion in 1951 for Rashomon and then celebrated for his career in 1982. The story of the old widower bureaucrat from Tokyo Kanji Watanabe, who understood that his life was empty after discovering to be affected by untreatable stomach cancer, was shifted by Ishiguro and Hermanus in the United Kingdom during the ’50s. nella Gran Bretagna degli anni ’50. Bill Nighy has been chosen as the protagonist (played in the Japanese version by an outstanding Takashi Shimura). The BAFTA winner for “Love, Actually” is supported by the young Aimee Lou Wood (Aimee Gibbs in the series Sex Education). Hermanus is known for Shirley Adams (2009), Beauty (2011, winner of the Queer Palm in Cannes), The Endless River (2015) and Moffie (2019). The Artistic Director of Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera says that Living is «one of the very few remakes definitely well done and fascinating».
Emanuele Bucci
BOBI WINE: GHETTO PRESIDENT
Uganda / UK / USA 2022, Director Christopher Sharp / Moses Bwayo, Running Time 121’
Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, who turned 40 last February, is the Ugandan musician known as Bobi Wine. He merged reggae, dancehall and afrobeat and was the leader of the Fire Base Crew and founded the band Ghetto Republic of Uganja. In 2013 and 2014, Bobi Wine was the protagonist of the tv series Da Ghetto President. In 2016 his track Kiwani was included in the soundtrack of Mira Nair’’s Queen of Katwe, and in July 2017, the artist was elected to the Ugandan parliament, becoming one of the leaders of the opposition against dictator Yoweri Museveni, who’s in charge since 1986. Arrested and convicted many times, Boni Wine ran for the presidential election in 2021, challenging the dictator who won his sixth consecutive term. European Union, USA and ONU refused to supervise the election because their officials were not accredited to the event, and Bobi Wine claimed that Yoweri Museveni organized a coup. Wine encouraged his supporters to protest in a pacific way.
This documentary follows the extraordinary story of this musician who became a political activist, then a congressman who defends the rights of those who don’t have a voice: the people from the ghetto. The directors of Bobi Winne: Ghetto President are Christopher Sharp, an Australian talent agent, already a producer of the thriller Hammer Bay (2007) and the short film Kill Your Dinner (2016), and Ugandan journalist Moses Bwayo, denounced and arrested for unlawful gathering while filming some scenes of this film.
Oscar Cosulich
