2017 Venice Film Festival

A fresh wind blew into the Venice Film Festival. Pink, red and white popped while Chloe Sevigny caused heads to turn.

Guillermo del Toro’s lifelong fascination with monsters and dark fable takes a liquid form in The Shape of Water, an otherworldly love story which is at its core a lyrical, poetic and poignant celebration of artists, idealists, and dreamers. And ultimately, as the director told an HFPA journalist just after receiving a minutes-long standing ovation at the Palazzo del Cinema, about love conquering fear.

In Venice, Ai Weiwei is more likely be expected to be at home across the lagoon, at the Biennale of contemporary art concurrently showing at the Arsenale, but this year the Chinese artist is walking the carpet at the film festival.  Human Flow, Ai’s first foray in the feature-length documentary form, is a powerful indictment of the global refugee crisis engulfing the world.

Style-wise, Venice marks the shift from high Summer to early Fall. It can be hot and humid on the Lido, inviting flowing gowns, light colors and short hems.

Festivals are all about a vast array of talent, ideas and points of view. A good festival - like the ever-classy, ever-young Venice Film Festival - also emphasizes collaboration, its relaxed atmosphere allowing for filmmakers and actors to get together to both celebrate their work and conjure future projects.

Director Guillermo del Toro calls his The Shape of Water, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, an allegorical parable about our time. And the whimsical fable set in a cold war dreamscape is a paean to love, an homage to movies and a celebration of dreamers, artists and free spirits and their triumph over the forces of hate, conflict and discrimination.

After a five-minute applause for the opening night film, filmmakers Alexander Payne, his producers and actors Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig and Hong Chau made a pit stop at the official festival party in a plastic tent on the beach in front of the Excelsior Hotel, before boarding boats to head over to the Grand Canal for their own dinner in the magnificent Ca’ Rezzonico Museum of 18th Century Art. The setting was anything but ‘downsized’: Murano glass chandeliers cast a magical light on the guests, the paintings and reliefs made many gaze up to the ceilings and not even the late hour – the main course of lobster was served at 1 am – could distract from the splendid venue.

The red carpet highlighted bright ball gowns that had some gasping at the 74th Venice Film Festival.

Simple elegance dominated the first red carpet of the 74th Venice Film Festival. Patterns and subtle European style were on display.

“After Sideways I had hoped this would be my next movie” says multi Golden Globe nominated and winner Alexander Payne – visibly elated to be in Venice and exhibiting his flawless accents in the Italian and Spanish words he interspersed liberally in the talk he had with HFPA journalists in the Excelsior hotel’s beautiful Sala Stucchi. As Hollywood would have it that was not to be, as development purgatory (and the shooting of The Descendants and Nebraska) pushed back the completion of Downsizing for more than ten years.