The Venice film festival appears to have largely shrugged off issues caused by non-attendance of Hollywood actors due to the Sag-Aftra strike as it unveiled its lineup for its 2023 edition.
Venice has traditionally functioned partly as a platform for major American releases looking for strong positioning in the autumn awards season, and it has already seen its originally announced opening film Challengers, a tennis drama starring Zendaya, drop out after it was forced to delay its release date.
However, Venice has been able to announce premieres of high-profile American films including Maestro, the Bradley Cooper-directed biopic of Leonard Bernstein, race-car drama Ferrari, starring Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz, and The Killer, a hitman drama directed by David Fincher and starring Michael Fassbender.
All three films will be competing for Venice’s prestigious Golden Lion, but unless the US actors’ strike is resolved it is likely none of their stars will be present for the festival’s red-carpet events and press calls.
At a press conference, festival director Alberto Barbera admitted Venice had been “[taken] a bit by surprise” by the strike, but that the impact had been “very modest”, saying that Challengers had been the only film “lost”. However, it had been thought likely that Dune: Part Two would premiere at the festival, as Part One had in 2021, but nervousness over actors’ publicity commitments as a result of the strike meant it is likely to be delayed.
Other high-profile films competing for the Golden Lion include Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla Presley biopic Priscilla starring Cailee Spaeny, sci-fi comedy Poor Things from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, with Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo, and Origin, an Ava DuVernay-directed drama based on Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book Caste. Non-US films in the Golden Lion competition include Agnieszka Holland’s The Green Border, about refugees caught up in the Belarus border crisis in 2021, Matteo Garrone’s migration drama Io Capitano, Italian film-industry drama Finally Dawn starring Lily James, and DogMan from French director Luc Besson, his first film since French courts dropped charges of rape against him.
The festival has also assembled a number of well-known names for its non-competition programme, including films by Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson and William Friedkin. Linklater’s film is Hit Man, based on the true life story of a Texas policeman who went undercover as a contract killer, while Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a 39-minute adaption of Roald Dahl’s short story. Friedkin will be showing a new adaptation of Herman Wouk’s classic novel The Caine Mutiny.
Venice has also found room for new films by Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, both of whom have dogged by controversy in recent years. Polanski’s film The Palace, a drama set in a Swiss hotel on New Year’s Eve with a cast including Oliver Masucci, Fanny Ardant and John Cleese, his second film to be selected for Venice since his expulsion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas) in 2018 over his 1977 conviction for statutory rape and subsequent flight from justice. Polanski’s previous film An Officer and a Spy was not released in the US and attracted significant protests when it was nominated for 12 César awards in France. Allen, who has been cleared twice of allegations that he sexually abused his daughter Dylan Farrow – which he strongly denies – has largely worked in Europe since ending his legal action with streaming giant Amazon in 2019, and is showing his French-language romantic thriller Coup de Chance, shot in Paris, and starring Lou de Laâge, Valérie Lemercier, Melvil Poupaud and Niels Schneider.
The Venice film festival is due to run from 30 August to 9 September.
