The HFPA’s Silvia Bizio spoke exclusively to the actress who graces the festival’s poster.

Nastassja Kinski will be at the Venice Film Festival, not as lead actress of a film as she has many times in the past, but as the festival icon. Her image graces the official poster of this 72nd edition of the world’s oldest film festival, which runs September 2-12. The image, created by Italian artist Simone Massi, portrays Kinski at the peak of her career, when she headlined cult-films such as Paris, Texas, Maria’s Lovers, Hotel New Hampshire and Faraway, So Close!.
The poster celebrates not only the famous German actress’ beauty, grace and talent, but also the great independent films of those years, the 80s.
“Nastassja Kinski embodies a magic period in international film,” said the festival’s director Alberto Barbera. “No one can represent better than Nastassja the genius and the work of the great auteurs of that decade.”
We reached Kinksi in Milan. “Venice wanted to dedicate this poster image to me and the films I was involved in,” says Kinski, recently seen in the Italian short film The Night Shift Belongs to the Stars, directed by Edoardo Ponti and written by Erri De Luca, starring Julian Sands. “It made me very proud and happy. I didn’t know anything about this poster until recently. It has been a true surprise. It’s a portrait inspired by a scene in Wim Wenders’ Faraway, So Close!, in which I sit at the top of the Brandeburgh Gate, right after the fall of Berlin’s Wall. “Wenders shot that film right after the fall of the Wall and the reunification of the two Germanies. I remember when Wenders wrote to ex-Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, promoter of glasnost and the process of reform in the Soviet Union called perestrojka,” Kinski continues. “Wenders told Gorbachev: ‘You’re our hero, you changed history for us all … I’m doing a movie about the Wall, and I would love to have you in it.’ Wim gave him a copy of his Wings of Desire, which he shot when the Wall was still there, a couple of years before. Gorbachev loved it and said ‘Yes, I would love to be in your new film.’ That’s how Gorbachev became an actor!”

Kinski talks more about that scene that inspired the Venetian poster. “In the film my character, sort of an angel, finds a child in the trash, and she takes him in her arms. Then I sit at the top of Brandeburgh Gate, and I could see Berlin, a 360 degree spectacular view. It was an emotionally intense moment, because I am myself ‘ein berliner’, from Berlin, and I knew the city before and after the Wall. That moment is a symbol for all mankind, and it has been captured in this poster. It’s me looking at humanity’s future, my eyes gazing over freedom. In the movie my jacket was not light blue, as it’s in the poster: it was gray and dark blue, and my hair was darker than it appears on Massi’s work. The artist has worked and played with the colors, as Andy Warhol did with me and with Marilyn Monroe. Massi has frozen a symbolic instant for art and art films.”
The actress who resides in Los Angeles and is mother to three grown children mused about her life. “I became a mother, and the love and care for my children overtook my artistic ambitions as an actress. There was something way more important than a career. And yet, I still love acting, I love film, and intend to go back to it. I deeply respect the art of it, and its ability to communicate and enlighten people.”
“I can’t wait to go to Venice,” she says at the end of our conversation. “I still can’t believe that my face will be on the poster all over the festival! My life was filled and enriched by amazing people,” concludes the actress who has worked with the likes of Polanski, Coppola and Paul Schrader. “I met many of them right here at this festival, in the past, when I was acting in those films … Venice has always been a very special place for me. I still believe in its magic.”
Silvia Bizio