KOBIETA Z…
Venezia 80 – Competition
Poland, Sweden, 2023 Director Małgorzata Szumowska, Michał Englert Starring Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik, Joanna Kulig, Bogumila Bajor, Mateusz Wieclawek Running time 132′
The Małgorzata Szumowska, Michał Englert duo returns to Venice three years after the highly acclaimed Never Gonna Snow Again in an edition 2023 that sees Polish cinema with two movies in competition. Kobieta z… (Woman of) traces 45 years in the life of Aniela Wesoły, a trans woman who faces many difficulties in achieving her affirmation as a person, facing painful and essential choices in Poland, also in transition after the fall of the Soviet bloc. “Kobieta z… is an important film for us,” explains the two directors and screenwriters, “the result of many years of work and countless encounters with transgender people of all ages who have lived in Poland for decades. For almost half her life, Aniela has lived as a man in a provincial town; she is a metaphor for Poland’s transition, reflecting a society that once united in solidarity to bring down the communist regime. That society is now synonymous with the polarization of attitudes. The film title is a tribute to our master Andrzej Wajda.” Who we recall, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at Venice in 1998. “At this time when cinema is replaced by content, we felt a strong need to tell Aniela’s unique story. Our film does not judge any of the attitudes presented. The most significant element is the humanistic tone of the story of our protagonists, followed respectfully by our camera.”
Alessandro De Simone
HORS SAISON
Venezia 80 – Competition
France, 2023 Director Stéphane Brizé Starring Guillaume Canet, Alba Rohrwacher, Sharif Andoura, Lucette Beudin Distribution I Wonder Pictures Running time 115’
Following the last chapter of what has been called the “work trilogy,” Stéphane Brizé, a valued frequenter of both the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival, brings Hors-Saison, an intimate drama starring Guillaume Canet and Alba Rohrwacher, to Venice 80 Competition. In 2021, Un autre monde, in competition for the Golden Lion, closed the French director’s three-film series, which began with The Law of the Market (La Loi du marché, 2015) and continued with En guerre (2018), the three of them starring Vincent Lindon in different roles, from worker to entrepreneur, centred on the theme of unemployment and precariousness. After the Pandemic, however, Brizé chooses to return to explore more intimate aspects of the human soul with a film that questions the choices, wrong or never made, in life. “I had already made several films that dealt with the devastating financial mechanisms of multinational corporations when the Covid occurred. That experience of isolation forced all of us to ‘pause’ activities […] we were probably all deeply shaken by the bewildering precariousness of existence. My characters reflect that moment of vertigo,” Brizé explains. In Hors – Saison Canet is Mathieu, an established and successful 50-year-old actor living in Paris. Rohrwacher is Alice, a piano teacher living in a small town near the sea in western France. They were in love fifteen years earlier, but they decided to separate, and time had healed their wounds and soothed their anger. They never meet again until Mathieu goes to a spa to overcome the melancholy that grips him and runs into Alice. “I wanted to dwell on the moments when we decided to take one path instead of another. Secret, haunting questions that we all ask ourselves, powerful or not, known or unknown, men and women,” Brizé says again.
Vania Amitrano
