Section:GDN 1N PaGe:3 Edition Date:190827 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 26/8/2019 17:00 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
3Tuesday 27 August 2019 The Guardian •
News
Five key fi lms at the festival
The Truth
Venice’s prize opening night
spot this year goes to the latest
fi lm by Hirokazu Kore-eda,
whose Shoplifters won top prize
at Cannes last year. Catherine
Deneuve plays an ailing French
star who returns home for a tricky
reconciliation with her daughter
(Juliette Binoche), accompanied
by her husband (Ethan Hawke) and
young child.Joker
Joaquin Phoenix is the cracked
aspirant stand up in this drama
from Todd Phillips that’s
reportedly 80% King of Comedy
and 20% The Dark Knight. Robert
De Niro co-stars; rumour has it this
might just be the fi rst comic book
fi lm to bag a best picture Oscar.Marriage Story
Noah Baumbach ’s latest is the
bittersweet story of a cross-coastal
divorce starring Adam Driver and
Scarlett Johansson.The King
Timothée Chalamet is Henry V in
this lush but tough Shakespeare
adaptation from David Michôd.
Ben Mendelsohn is Henry’s father;
Robert Pattinson, Joel Edgerton
and Chalamet’s girlfriend, Lily-Rose
Depp, off er support.The Laundromat
Meryl Streep leads Steven
Soderbergh’s fi ctionalised take on
the Panama Papers leak of 11.4m
documents detailing the fi nancial
exploits of the law fi rm Mossack
Fon seca. Catherine ShoardLanre Bakare
Catherine Shoard
A mix of Hollywood A-listers and art-
house auteurs has produced another
attention-grabbing year for the Venice
fi lm festival, but the inclusion of con-
troversial directors and a continued
gender imbalance ha s dominated the
build-up to the event, which opens its
76th edition tomorrow.
Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the
Palme d’ Or in 2018 for his fi lm Shoplift-
ers , opens the festival with The Truth ,
which stars Catherine Deneuve and
Juliette Binoche. The French- language
drama will be the fi rst fi lm the director
has made that will not be in his native
Japanese. The French director Olivier
Assayas also moves into new linguis-
tic territory with an English-language
spy thriller, Wasp Network.
The coveted opening slot is usually
reserved for an awards season hopeful,
and Venice has hosted world premieres
for three of the past fi ve winners of the
best-picture Oscar.
Netflix continues its romance
with the festival, and will again use
it as a launchpad for its own trio of
Oscar hopefuls. Steven Soderbergh ’s
drama based on the Panama Papers ,
The Laundromat ; Noah Baumbach ’s
study of divorce, Marriage Story ; and
David Michôd ’s Shakespeare adap-
tation, The King – which stars Robert
Pattinson and Timothée Chalamet –
will all feature at the Venice Lido.
Martin Scorsese’s mob saga The
Irishman , which was bought by
Netfl ix , will not be showing at the fes-
tival despite earlier rumours.
Amazon is represented by the polit-
ical thriller Seberg, which stars Kristen
Stewart as the actor Jean Seberg, who
was targeted by the FBI because of her
support for the Black Panthers.
The sci-fi epic Ad Astra , directed
by James Gray, stars Brad Pitt as an
astronaut in search of his father. The
Lido will also play host to the latest
evolution in superhero fi lms , Todd
Phillips’s Batman spin-off , The Joker ,
which stars Joaquin Phoenix and is
being spoken about as a dark horse
for the awards season. But divisive
directors are another feature of this
year’s festival.
Roman Polanski will air his lat-
est project, An Offi cer and a Spy , a
fi lm about the Dreyfus aff air, starring
Jean Dujardin and Louis Garrel. The
director – who was expelled from the
Academy over his continued avoid-
ance of an arrest warrant for his 1978
conviction on child sex charges – has
been given a competition slot.
When the full lineup was
announced, Melissa Silverstein,
founder of the organisation Women
and Hollywood, tweeted: “1 rapist.
2 women directors in competition ...
What else am I missing?”
Another controversial inclusion
is Nate Parker , the actor and direc-
tor who won the grand jury prize at
Sundance in 2016 for his slavery drama
The Birth of a Nation , before a historic
rape allegation resurfaced and the fi lm
went on to lose millions for Fox after it
was bought for $17.5m. Parker and hiscollege roommate, Jean Celestin, were
accused of raping a woman while at
university in the late 90s. Parker was
acquitted while Celestin was con-
victed, although this was overturned.
The woman killed herself in 2012.
American Skin is his fi rst fi lm since
The Birth of a Nation and is being “pre-
sented” by Spike Lee , with Parker
starring as an Iraq war veteran whose
son is killed by a white police offi cer.
The dearth of female fi lm-makers- only Shannon Murphy (Babyteeth)
and Haifaa al-Mansour (The Perfect
Candidate) are among the 21 fi lms
represented in the main competition - has attracted attention again. Last
year there was only one fi lm directed
by a woman – Jennifer Kent’s The
Night ingale – and Alberto Barbera, the
Venice festival’s director, said it would
be “really off ensive for a director” to
be included because of his or her gen-
der and that selections are made “on
the basis of the quality of the fi lm”.
This year Barbera pointed to fi lms
such as Pablo Larraín’s Ema and Yann
Arthus-Bertrand and Anastasia Mik-
ova’s documentary, Woman, which
will screen out of competition, as some
of the fi lms that are “ dedicated to the
female condition ”.
“Women directors are unfortu-
nately still a minority,” he said. “But
these portraits of women, even when
they are directed by men, reveal a new
sensibility geared towards the femi-
nine universe, as had rarely happened
in the past.”
The Toronto fi lm festival, which
runs at the same time as Venice, says
35% of its fi lms are directed by women.
Shortage
of female
directors
at Venice
once again
▼ Timothée Chalamet, centre, in
The King, directed by David Michôd,
one of three Netfl ix fi lms on show
PHOTOGRAPH: NETFLIX Scarlett Johansson, Azhy Robertson
and Adam Driver in Marriage Story,
far left, and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker
PHOTOGRAPHS: ALLSTAR/NETFLIX; WARNER BROS’Ow do, Alexa? You’re getting
competition from the Beeb
Jim Waterson
Media editor
The BBC is preparing to launch its own
rival to Amazon’s Alexa called “Beeb”
- with a pledge that it will understand
British accents. The voice assistant,
which has been created by an in-house
team, will be launched next year, with
a focus on enabling people to fi nd their
favourite programmes and interact
with online services.
While some US-developed products
struggle to understand British regional
accents, the BBC will ask staff around
the UK to record their voices so soft-
ware can be taught to understandthem. The Beeb software will be built
into the BBC’s website, its iPlayer app
on smart TVs and made available to
manufacturers who want to incorpo-
rate the public broadcaster’s software.
The voice assistant will be activated
by saying the word “Beeb”, although
it will not attempt to replicate the full
set of functions provided by major
commercial rivals – partly because
the BBC product has been developed
by a much smaller team without the
resources of major global technology
companies. Instead, it will be deployed
to enable people to use their voice toengage with existing BBC content
and develop new forms of interactive
programming.
The rapid growth of smart speakers ,
driven by cut-price products provided
by Amazon and Google, means a fi fth
of households are using a voice assis-
tant. This is making it easier for them
to try new radio stations, while also
changing how they interact with other
forms of media by placing the devices
at the centre of the home.
The BBC already works with other
voice assistants but it is increas-
ingly pushing users towards its ownproducts, partly so it can collect more
data. From the end of this month its
radio stations will no longer be avail-
able on the popular TuneIn radio app,
which is used by Amazon’s Alexa,
because the US company refused to
share information on who is listening
to BBC stations.
The BBC said: “With an assistant of
its own, the BBC will have the freedom
to experiment with new programmes,
features and experiences without
someone else’s permission to build it
in a certain way. It will also allow the
BBC to be much more ambitious .”RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws