Synopses taken from the catalogue of the 65th Venice International Film Festival

published by Electa

Ramin Bahrani

Goodbye Solo

Solo, a kindhearted and friendly 34- year-old Senegalese taxi driver in North Carolina, is hired by William, a tough 70-yearold white southerner, to drive him in two weeks time to a mountaintop from which William plans to jump to his death. But Solo decides to charm his way into William’s life by becoming his driver, and this odd couple begins an unexpected friendship as Solo hopes to change the old man’s mind before the two weeks are up.

Julio Bressane

A Erva do Rato

A Erva do Ratois a free adaptation (and fusion) of two tales written by Machado de Assis: Um Esqueleto and A Causa Secreta. The names of the characters are simply He and She. He and She walk around a cemetery nearby the seashore. They don’t know each other and are the only alive people there. Suddenly, stepping on a rock loose on the ground, She trips and falls. He helps her. She has nobody else in the world. Facing that situation, He offers to look after She forever. At his home, they devote themselves to a job: He serves her one of many cups of herbal tea She is going to drink, and tells her a story. She listens and writes everything down in her notebooks, that pile up in high walls. Slowly She begins to feel tired. The dictation, though, continues. He goes on about the ambiguity of the geographical forms of the city, about the poisons prepared by ancient indigenous tribes and about the “Erva de Rato” (Tangaracá).

Lav Diaz

Melancholia

Why is there so much sadness and too much madness in this world? Is happiness just a concept? Is living just a process to measure man’s pain? Alberta, Julian and Rina struggle hard to find answers to these questions. To be able to fight pain, they assume different personas as a coping exercise. Julian still listens to the voice and songs of his dead wife; Alberta is still looking for the body of her husband; Rina eventually gives up. Deep in the forest of a desolate island, Renato and his comrades fight fiercely the military machine that has pursued them relentlessly. They are trapped. In his notebook, Renato writes: «I now realized the lyrical madness to this struggle. It is all about sadness. It is about my sadness. It is about the sorrow of my people. I cannot romanticize the futility of it all. Even the majestic beauty of this island could not provide an answer to this hell. There is no cure to this sadness».

Jean-Pierre Duret, Andréa Santana

Puisque nous sommes nés

Brazil. The state of Pernambouc. A huge service station at the side of an endless road. Cocada, 14, lives there, in an old truck, ever since his father was murdered. He has a dream, to become a truck driver. Nego lives in a favela; he wants to leave and make money. At night, the two boys wander about the service station, fascinated by the businesses that sell everything, abundant food, the movement of the trucks and travellers. Everything speaks to them about this big country which they don’t know at all. With this singular maturity that one gets very early in adversity, they question themselves about their identity and their future. Their only perspective: a road towards somewhere else.

Philippe Grandrieux

Un lac

A village we know nothing about, a village covered by snow and forests, somewhere in the north. A family is living in an isolated house near a lake. Alexi, the brother, is a young man with a pure heart, a lumberjack. Subject to epileptic fits, ecstatics by nature, he is at one with the nature around him. Alexi is very fond of his younger sister, Hege. Their mother is blind while the father and younger brother watch this compulsive love. A foreigner arrives, a young man who is just a little older than Alexi...

Huang Wenhai

Wo men

For the first time, the “other China” fills the screen and has its say. Women gives a voice to the civil conscience of many who fight in the struggle for a better country. The voices in this film are all conscientious citizens doing their utmost to improve the state of their nation. Their ethos is: «Where affairs of state are concerned, we cannot stand idly by and watch». And yet the reward for their concern is a lifetime spent in political turmoil, years of periodic intimidation and surveillance. This film illustrates the perils of seeking freedom in a time of darkness, in a time when criticism requires transformation. It depicts the harsh realities faced by three generations of activists – young, middle-aged and elderly – and allows us to better understand their anxieties, hopes, despairs and above all, their persistence.