Synopses taken from the catalogue of the 65th Venice International Film Festival
published by Electa
Francis Xavier Pasion
Jay
Jay, a gay schoolteacher, is brutally murdered in an apparent sex-crime. Even before his family hears about it, a TV producer – also named Jay – and his camera crew are inside their house to document their shock and grief. The TV producer convinces the family to let him shoot the dead man’s wake and funeral for a “reality show”. This will help them to ferret out the truth about the crime, find the killer, and bring him to justice, he says. However, it soon becomes clear that this concept of “truth” owes much to the entertainment value of the material being shot, and the expectations of the television audience. Skillfully orchestrating this “reality show” is the dead man’s namesake – a “journalist” who knows that the “truth” is whatever works on camera. The writer-director’s insider’s knowledge of broadcasting informs his incisive satire, which hits home by making fun of journalistic practices that are too outrageous and shameless not to be true. But Jay– with its mise-en-abîmeof reality, dissolving into infinite layers of media images and vice-versa – is also a meditation on the ways in which the third world is produced everyday as a spectacle, and a reflection on audiences that want their entertainment to be as crazy as the reality they live in.
Eugenio Polgovsky
Los Herederos
Children begin to work in the Mexican countryside at a young age. Los Herederos is a journey through their lives and their daily struggle for survival. These children’s realities echo those of their ancestors. Generation after remain trapped in the perpetual cycle of inherited poverty.
Marco Pontecorvo
PA-RA-DA
The true story of the French- Algerian clown Miloud Oukili from his arrival in Romania, back in 1992 in his early twenties (three years after the end of Ceausescu’s dictatorship), to his encounter with the street children of Bucharest, the so called «boskettari» – groups of kids living in the streets and sleeping in underground Bucharest making a living out of small thefts, begging, and prostitution. Miloud wants to meet these kids, which have been completely hardened by their tragic lives (full of fights, violence, losses, pedophilia and drugs), and bring some hope in their existence. Although hampered by corrupted officers, Miloud will succeed in creating a real circus company with the «boskettari». The street children will perform in Bucharest’s main square, proving the world that they are human beings, just like everybody else. Parada is the name of the established circus company that today still travels around Europe with its own show, carrying a message of friendship, solidarity and hope.
Gianfranco Rosi
Below Sea Level
This is the story of people who have gone past us. There is a place to go: 190 miles S.E. of LA and 129 feet below sea level where they have no running water, no electricity. This is the story of Ken and Lily, of Carol and Wayne, of Mike, Cindy, and Sterling. The film covers four years of their lives. They live below sea level, the place where all the debris, physical and mental, of our times comes to rest and is preserved in the dry desert air. No one can drop lower than this ground and only on this ground, it seems, can people finally see the future. The place looks like the apocalypse and feels like home.
Andreď Schtakleff, Jonathan Le Fourn
L’Exil et le Royaume
At the foothills of the Empire, some go fishing, some go flirting. Time flies. Cigarette after cigarette, we reinvent the world. When the weather is good on the other side, we can see the lost Paradise. Is it a mirage? Walking the streets of the city, shouting so that we are not lonely in fear. Opening the tiny apartment to welcome in the world around. Collaborating, sabotaging. We walk, we talk. Some rise, some fall. It feels beautiful, even when it fails. We try to cease the urgency to be together. A former railwayman sinking into History, a teacher wandering through the night tracking down the police, an Afghan hiding away, two unemployed quantum boys, a mustached host and his Eritrean women… They cross paths, skim, avoid each other; their trajectories define a space where the daily reality is yet to be reinvented, in a world constantly falling apart. The time has come for us to become unreasonable: the whole world is passing through Calais.
Emily Tang
Wanmei Shenhuo
Two women cross paths at an important turning point in their lives. Strangers, and yet very different, somehow their pasts and futures may have a lot in common. Stuck in a dreary industrial town in northeastern China, troubled 21-year-old Li finally gets the chance to step out and see the world when a disabled man asks her to help him carry a painting to Shenzhen, in the far south, near Hong Kong. Although she loses trust in the thin promises of men, Li refuses to go home and now faces a hard life in Shenzhen. Jenny encounters Li on a street corner in Shenzhen. Jenny is in the midst of a divorce. For no apparent reason, she has chosen to leave the Hong Kong life she had always dreamed of and struggled so long to attain.
