During its 39th edition, the Settimana Internazionale della Critica in Venice showed different movies that spoke about our contemporary society in many different ways.
“What world, what times are we living in?” This is the first sentence that Beatrice Fiorentino, the artistic director of the 39. Settimana Internazionale della Critica, used to introduce the 2024 programme. The answer came from the movies that she and her selection team chose for this edition.
Throughout the years, the Venice Settimana Internazionale della Critica, founded in 1984 by Italian film historian and critic Lino Micciché, has selected first feature films by emerging directors from all over the world, who then went on to establish themselves in the international panorama. It is interesting to notice that, in this year’s selection, there was a movie called Anywhere Anytime. The film is about Issa, a young illegal immigrant living in Turin, Italy, trying to survive as best as he can. Fired by his previous employer, he begins working as a food-delivery rider, thanks to his friend. However, this newly gained stability collapses when, during a drop-off, the bicycle he has just spent all his money on is stolen. Issa immediately embarks on a desperate odyssey through the streets of the city to find his bike. The title, Anywhere Anytime, sounds like a manifesto. The Settimana Internazionale della Critica wants to embrace films and directors from all over the world and wants to discover different times. What world… What times… do you remember?
“We are inside an indeterminate present, where the risk,” Fiorentino continues, “is we are losing the ability to interpret our reality, almost as if our reference points – the codes by which we used to recognise and define ourselves according to a common language – have become suddenly inadequate, fallacious, contradictory. The films shortlisted, then, are travelling in the same direction, substantiating the bewilderment that we as humans share at every latitude of the planet. A selection with strong chiaroscuro overtones, that conveys a sense of general instability and tackles a range of subjects – in their composite variety, they communicate with each other according to the laws of attraction, coalescing to generate a broader discourse, more dynamic and pluralistic.”
In fact, maybe never so much as this year, the selection of the Settimana Internazionale della Critica seemed heterogeneous: from the American reportage Homegrown (an unflinching chronicle of Americans at war with each other, where three right-wing activists crisscross the country in the summer of 2020, campaigning for Donald Trump and building a movement they hope will outlast him. When they become convinced that the election is stolen, they take their fight to the streets) to the Austrian dramedy Peacock (the story of Matthias, a guy who excels at pretending to be someone else every day, just being himself is the real challenge), passing through the intense Egyptian Perfumed With Mint (a film that tells the story of Bahaa, a lovesick physician and his old friend Mahdy, who try to escape the ghosts of their past, running from one abandoned house to another as they are chased relentlessly by shadows) to the funny Paul & Paulette Take a Bath (a twisted romantic comedy about a young American photographer and a French girl with a taste for the macabre). All the movies presented in the Settimana Internazionale della Critica were able to let audiences escape from their everyday lives and let them live a journey full of different sounds, tastes, cultures. The contemporary times are a sort of jungle; it seems very hard try to lead them, understand them. Cinema can help in making order by inviting us to feel something different, something weird and unusual, something that we never felt before.
Often, nowdays, we hear the slogan saying that cinema is dead. Well, the 39. Settimana Internazionale della Critica proves that cinema is not dead, rather it is simply changing its face, its body. Anywhere. Anytime. These are the times we are living in. This is the Settimana, pardon, the Week we lived in Venice.
Simone Soranna
Edited by Alissa Simon
© FIPRESCI 2024