2016 Venice Film Festival

Andrew Garfield plays Desmond Doss in Mel Gibson’s true-life epic Hacksaw Ridge. A Virginia farm boy who enlisted in the army as a medic during World War 2 but steadfastly clung to his pacifist 7th Day Adventist faith refusing to touch a weapon, Doss was initially court-martialed by the army but having won the right to his conscientious objection and later proved uncommon bravery in the Pacific saving scores of wounded comrades while wholly unarmed in the face of fierce fighting.

All festivals are, by their own nature, a perfect environment for promotion. The most spectacular feats of publicity are usually reserved for Venice's younger cousin, Cannes, but Lido & Lagoon have their own particular dose of look-at-me-strategies.

With a ten minute standing ovation after the first screening of his Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson could hardly have hoped for a more auspicious return to filmmaking. The Word War II epic marks his fifth feature as a director and the first since Apocalypto ten years ago.

Ulrich Seidl has already won three Venice Festival awards, two for Paradise: Faith in 2012 and the Grand Special Jury Prize for his 2001 feature Hundstage (Dog Days). He is back now with Safari, a film that is shown in the festival’s  documentary section.

If the festival’s worth is judged by the opening, things augur well for this 73rd edition of the Venice Film Festival. Damien Chazelle’s endearing, cinephile, unabashedly romantic musical La La Land is still one of the most buzzed about titles here.

While festivalgoers are taken with the mundane business of premieres, red carpets, press conferences and generally binging on (and arguing about) films, the future of the art form is on view in a room tucked on the Casino mezzanine here. At least that’s what the Virtual Reality boosters would like you to think.

One of the most unique aspects of the Venice Film Festival is how intimate it feels, compared to similar grade AA events in the festival circuit. Maybe because it takes place on a resort island that exudes calm and relaxation, maybe because it's infused with warm Italian joy de vivre, Venice brings audiences and movies, stars and fans as close together as they can be without causing a conflagration.

The weekend arrives noisy and busy on the Lido. It's the ideal frame for parties, celebrations and assorted special events.

You could tell the first weekend was here by the loud music thumping from various Lido locales on Friday. On Day 3 the Venice Film Festival was definitely firing on all pistons with the competition featuring El Cristo Ciego by Chilean director Cristopher Murray, Frantz from French stalwart François Ozon, a disturbing documentary on big game hunting by Austrian Ulrich Seidl (Safari) and Tom Ford’s literary noir Nocturnal Animals  with Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhall, Michael Shannon and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

The Venice festival has been at the forefront of recognizing serialized fiction as an emerging and integral part of the film making landscape. Two years ago Golden Globe nominated HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge bowed at the Sala Darsena here, and this year the festival hosted the world premiere of the HBO/Canal+/Sky The Young Pope, directed by Golden Globe winning director Paolo Sorrentino, (La Grande  Bellezza, Best Foreign Film - 2013).