(Conclusion of a two-part series on women filmmakers in the 79^th Venice International Film Festival)

 

Horizons (Orizzonti)

Four films by three women filmmakers made it to the 18-film slate of Horizons or just 22% are female directors.

 

The Happiest Man in the World – Teona Strugar Mitevska

 

Teona Strugar Mitevska is a Macedonian director and screenwriter who began her career as an art director. She moved to New York to study cinema at the Tisch School of the Arts where she has a Master of Film Arts degree. She defines herself as a “femarftivist,” mixing feminism with her commitments and an artistic dimension.

Her film, The Happiest Man in the World, is a tale of redemption and forgiveness. The film is about Asja, a 40-year-old single woman who lives in Sarajevo. In order to meet new people, she ends up spending her Saturday at a speed dating event. She is matched with Zoran, a 43-year-old banker. However, Zoran is not looking for love but forgiveness.

Mitevska said, “What defines us: our ethnicity, religion, gender? What divides us or unites us? This is a story about the precariousness of life, chance encounters that bring together the aggressor and the victim, reviving the painful past; this is a story of impossible connections, of love and absurdity. The film begins as a humor-driven excursion and develops into a mountain of experiences, as the characters seek recognition and responsibility to reach a point of forgiveness…Location is essential: an 80’s hotel, built in brutalist architectural style, witness to ex-Yugoslav past, and then there is the injured city of Sarajevo, a testament to open wounds and pains of former times.”

 

Trenque Lauquen (Parts I and II) – Laura Citarella

 

Laura Citarella is a 41-year-old director and producer who has been noted as an emerging voice of the “New Argentine Cinema movement.”

Born in La Plata, Argentina, Citarella attended Universidad del Cine where she has a degree in film directing. Aside from making films, she also teaches scriptwriting at Universidad Nacional de La Plata.

Trenque Lauquen (Parts I and II) is a sequel to her 2011 film, Ostende.

The two-part film is about a woman who vanishes, and the two men who love her go on the road in search of her. Each of them has his own suspicions about why the woman left and hides them from the other.

According to Citarella, “This film is part of a larger idea: a group of films where the same character lives different lives in different towns in the province of Buenos Aires. The first film of the saga is called Ostende and it’s my first film as a director. The character, Laura, is always performed by Laura Paredes. And the director, myself, is also Laura. Perhaps too many Lauras.

“But what crosses the whole saga is a central idea: a female Sherlock Holmes of sorts, lost in towns, keener for adventures more than anything else. A film composed of different kinds of women. Women who chase women. Female detectives. Female scientists. Women that, for different reasons, run away. The cartographies of books as maps to life. Maternity. The conquest of territory. Men in love. The nobility of some men. The idiocy of the same men. The bureaucracy and the flowers. The town. The humans. The animals. The plants. The unknown.”

 

Vera – Tizza Covi

Tizza Covi is an Italian screenwriter and director who lived in Paris and Berlin before studying photography in Vienna. Since 1996, she has worked with Rainer Frimmel with whom she co-founded their own film production company, Vento Film.

Vera, which she co-directed with Frimmel, is about an upper-class woman seeking an escape from high society. Vera lives in the shadow of her famous father. Tired of her superficial life and relationships, she drifts through Roman high society. When she injures a child in a traffic accident in the suburbs, she forms an intense relationship with the eight-year-old boy and his father. But soon, she must realize that in this world, she is only an instrument for others.

Covi explained, “At the beginning of every idea for a film stands curiosity about the lives of others, and the attempt to understand what this life really looks like behind the façade. During filming, the real people remain real and at the same time, they are transformed into fictional characters. And at the end of filming, even we no longer know what is true and what we have invented.”

 

Horizons (Orizzonti) Extra

In the Horizons Extra category where nine titles are entered, only two (22%) are helmed by women.

 

Amanda – Carolina Cavalli

 

Born in Milan, Italy, Carolina Cavalli is an award-winning filmmaker whose first feature film is Amanda.

The movie is about 24-year-old Amanda, the lonely titular character who resorts to gaslighting in order to find friendship.

Cavalli said, “I’m not sure whether Amanda is about loneliness or friendship. Fundamentally, it’s about Amanda who feels very alone and wants a friend at any cost.”

 

Nezouh – Soudade Kaadan

 

Soudade Kaadan is a Syrian director who was born in France. She studied theater criticism at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Syria and filmmaking at Saint Joseph University in Lebanon. Her first feature fiction film, The Day I Lost My Shadow, was awarded The Lion of the Future Award for best debut film at the Venice Film Festival in 2018.

Nezouh centers on teenage girl Zenia who discovers the outside world for the first time when a missile destroys the ceiling of her Damascus home. It is an allegorical tale of female emancipation set amidst the Syrian conflict in Damascus, about a family who decides to stay behind in the besieged area.

Kaadan shared, “It is only after the bombing started in our neighborhood in Damascus that I left the house with my sister. Damascene society was conservative, even in liberal families. With the new wave of displacement, it became normal (for the first time) to see young Damascene women living alone and separating from their families. Myself, and many of my friends, started to make decisions we would never make before.

“Now, sadly, there is no more society, something new has occurred. ‘Nezouh’ in Arabic is the displacement of souls, water, and people; it is the displacement of light and darkness. Nezouh tries to talk about this inevitable invasion of light and hope in the midst of this chaos.”