The second day of Venice 80 certified yesterday a new step forward in destroying the wall that has separated films and their actors, directors and writers from the world of series, including the art-house series. The Venice Film Festival, which was among the first years ago to open its doors to a genre that has left the term fiction to generalist TV to give cinematic dignity to the word “series”, hosts this year, out of competition, the premiere of D’Argent et De sang, by French director Xavier Giannoli. Vincent Lindon, a fetish actor in French cinema, is the lead, abandoning the fast pace of cinema to work over a year on the set of this series. And Lindon, co-star in 2021 in the groundbreaking Cannes Golden Palm Titane, yesterday called the role in Giannoli’s series “the most important of his career,” proving even to recalcitrant French audiences that the differences between cinema and series now have no reason to exist. A trend predicted ten years ago by Bernardo Bertolucci, the first Maestro who was convinced that “series will increasingly be the new terrain of expression for art-house cinema.” Since then, the direction taken by authors and producers was traced, albeit travelled slowly, at least until the advent of the pandemic, which accelerated the phenomenon, certified last February at another major festival, the Berlinale, by none other than His Majesty Steven Spielberg, who announced his first series as director based on a Stanley Kubrick project. Shortly following is the announcement that even Robert De Niro will turn to a series, starring in and executive producing Zero Day, a political thriller for Netflix.
Meanwhile, series are also conquering the big festivals. And if at Cannes in May it was Lily Rose Depp’s exploits in the series The Idol that created a real stir, two months earlier, at the Berlinale, it was Elisa Amoruso’s The Good Mothers, inspired by the true story of Lea Garofalo, the first title to win the Series Awards established by that prestigious festival. It was good news for the Italian audiovisual sector, which occupies cutting-edge positions in auteur seriality.
