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 venice film festival roundup 2004
It’s revolution in Venice. The festival is dead, long live the festival. Tim Robbins captured the spirit of this year’s Venice Film Festival when he said, “We’re going to the beach tonight with our movie. This is what you have to do when you‘re not allowed in - you have to make your own festival.”Having spent $1.2m renovating the Palazzo Del Cinema, the VFF found itself upstaged by the Global Beach Festival, which took place on a plot of free reclaimed sand. The group of anti-globalization protesters even achieved the impossible by putting some excitement into Spielberg’s drab The Terminal when they tried to storm the opening night to protest at the Hollywood-ization of the official festival.  The Take and 5x2 The festival, which usually acts like a teenage groupie around a celebrity, was never actually going to turn away Robbins. His film of his own play, Embedded, was premiering there, as was Naomi Klein and husband Avi Lewis’ intriguing documentary on Argentinian co-operative movements, The Take. But both films quickly found their way across the Lido to the party they called the Global Beach Festival. The protesters had good reason to complain. There were 21 American films being shown outside competition, several of which had opened Stateside and needed no more publicty: Michael Mann’s Collateral, Jonathan Demme’s Manchurian Candidate, Tony Scott’s Man On Fire and jury member Spike Lee’s She Hate Me (OK, so that can use all the help it can get) were all on the roster.  Mar Adentro and Mysterious Skin There were a few films in the first week, though, worth getting out of your bikinis for: Gregg Araki’s audacious Mysterious Skin; François Ozon doing a Gaspar Noé by recounting a divorce backwards in 5x2; Alejandro Amenábar’s haunting euthanasia biopic Mar Adentro; Mike Leigh’s 50s abortion drama Vera Drake; Takeshi Miike's millionth film, Izo; and Todd Solondz up to his usual tricks with Palindromes. Watch this space for more on these in the coming months
Kaleem Aftab
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