Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Greta Gerwig and Harry Styles are among the names heading for the Venice Lido later this year, it has been revealed, after the Venice film festival announced its lineup for its 2022 edition.
Blanchett is starring in TÁR, a drama about a leading female orchestra conductor written and directed by Little Children’s Todd Field, and which will compete for the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion. The films it will be up against include Bones and All, starring Chalamet and Taylor Russell in a story adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis about teenage cannibals, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Gerwig appears opposite Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s celebrated novel White Noise, a project with a long and involved production history, which was previously announced as the festival’s opening gala. Styles stars opposite Florence Pugh in Don’t Worry Darling, a 50s-set suburban thriller directed by Olivia Wilde, which has secured a non-competitive slot.
Elsewhere in the lineup, places have been found for The Eternal Daughter, the “secret” drama filmed by The Souvenir director Joanna Hogg in Wales during lockdown starring Tilda Swinton, and Blonde, the Marilyn Monroe biopic directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas. Both films will be competing for the Golden Lion against The Banshees of Inisherin, a new drama from Martin McDonagh featuring Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan; Darren Aronofsky-directed drama The Whale, featuring Brendan Fraser as a 600lb man attempting to reconnect with his teenage daughter; Bardo, a comedy about a journalist from Mexican auteur Alejandro González Iñárritu; and The Son, Florian Zeller’s follow-up to The Father starring Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern and Vanessa Kirby.
Jafar Panahi, who was last week sentenced to six years in prison in Iran, also has a new film selected for competition: No Bears, described as “two parallel love stories in which the partners are thwarted by hidden, inevitable obstacles, the force of superstition, and the mechanics of power”.
Alongside Don’t Worry Darling, the out-of-competition screenings will include new films from veteran directors Walter Hill and Paul Schrader: the former with Dead for a Dollar, a western starring Christoph Waltz as a bounty hunter, and the latter with Master Gardener, with Joel Edgerton as a horticulturalist with a dark past. Also showing non-competitively will be Living, directed by Oliver Hermanus, a British-set remake of the Akira Kurosawa classic Ikiru, with Bill Nighy as a 1950s bureaucrat who discovers he is terminally ill.
As high-end TV is now a permanent fixture on the festival circuit, two high-profile directors will have work showing at Venice: Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom Exodus, the third and apparently final section of the hospital set mini-series, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Netflix series Copenhagen Cowboy, a neo-noir set in Denmark’s capital. Venice’s embrace of streaming services – in contrast to the Cannes film festival – has meant that it can accommodate a number of high-profile films: White Noise, Bardo and Blonde are among the titles already signed up by Netflix prior to their premieres.
The Venice film festival runs from 31 August to 10 September.
Full line up of films
Competition
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (director: Laura Poitras)
Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Miter)
Athena (Romain Gavras)
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)
Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths) (Alejandro G Iñárritu)
Beyond the Wall (Vahid Jalilvand)
Blonde (Andrew Dominik)
Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino)
Chiara (Susanna Nicchiarelli)
A Couple (Frederick Wiseman)
The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)
L’Immensita (Emanuele Crialese)
Love Life (Kōji Fukada)
Monica (Andrea Pallaoro)
No Bears (Jafar Panahi)
Other People’s Children (Rebecca Zlotowski)
Our Ties (Roschdy Zem)
Saint Omer (Alice Diop)
Il Signore delle formiche (Gianni Amelio)
The Son (Florian Zeller)
Tar (Todd Field)
The Whale (Darren Aronofsky)
Out of competition – fiction films
Call of God (Kim Ki-duk)
Dead for a Dollar (Walter Hill)
Don’t Worry Darling (Olivia Wilde)
Dreamin’ Wild (Bill Pohlad)
Drought – Siccità (Paolo Virzì)
The Hanging Sun (Francesco Carrozzini)
Living (Oliver Hermanus)
Master Gardener (Paul Schrader)
Pearl (Ti West)
When the Waves Are Gone (Lav Diaz)
Out of competition – documentaries
Bobi Wine Ghetto President (Christopher Sharp, Moses Bwayo)
A Compassionate Spy (Steve James)
Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom (Evgeny Afineevsky)
In Viaggio (Gianfranco Rosi)
The kyiv Trial (Sergei Loznitsa)
The Matchmaker (Benedetta Argentieri)
Music For Black Pigeons (Jorgen Leth, Andreas Koefoed)
Nuclear (Oliver Stone)
Gli Ultimi Giorni Dell’Umanita (Enrico Ghezzi, Alessandro Gagliardo)
short films
Look At Me (dir: Sally Potter)
Maid (dir: Lucretia Martel)
Series
Copenhagen Cowboys (Nicolas Winding Refn)
The Kingdom Exodus (Lars von Trier)
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism