74 Venice International Film Festival

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

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.

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.

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.

Paul Schrader’s singular path to becoming one of American cinema’s enduring original voices was unusual to say the least. The writer or co-writer of films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull (both screenplays were nominated for Golden Globes) and the Last Temptation of Christ and director of American Gigolo, Cat People and Auto Focus, he had never seen a film before the age of seventeen, being more occupied by a strict Calvinist upbringing and college studies with a minor in theology.