Synopses taken from the catalogue of the 64th Venice International Film Festival

published by Electa

Robert Pulcini & Shari Springer Berman

The Nanny Diaries  

Annie Braddock is a young woman from a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, struggling to understand her place in the world. Fresh out of college, she gets tremendous pressure from her mother to find a respectable position in the business world although Annie would prefer to trade in her blackberry for an anthropologist’s field diary. Through a serendipitous meeting, Annie ends up in the elite and ritualistic culture of Manhattan’s Upper East Side – as remote from Annie’s suburban New Jersey upbringing as life in an Amazon tribal village. Choosing to duck out of real life, Annie accepts the position as a nanny for a wealthy family, referred to as simply “the X’s”. She quickly learns that life is not very rosy on the other side of the tax bracket, as she must cater to the every whim of Mrs. X and her precocious son Grayer, while attempting to avoid the formidable Mr. X. Life becomes even more complicated when Annie falls for a gorgeous Park Avenue Hottie, and she’s forced to re-examine her life and the direction in which it is headed.

Adrià García & Víctor Maldonado

Nocturna   

What is it that makes the night so mysterious? What’s behind all of those little unexplainable things that happen when darkness falls? What makes us fall asleep, and dream? Could it be that there is somebody, somewhere, making sure that all of this happens just the way it is supposed to? It’s true that Tim never asked himself these questions, but from the moment he saw that tiny, fragile star fall from the sky as he sat upon the orphanage rooftop, he knew that something was going wrong. Maybe if he wouldn’t have leaned over to see where it fell he would have never slipped off the roof, and fallen into the nocturnal void. Then he would have never been rescued by the Cat Shepherd, and his incredible following of cats, and they in turn would have never told him the truth about the many people working endlessly to make the night such a magical place. But of course, he wouldn’t have decided right then and there to overcome his fears and begin his adventure through the night in search of that little fallen star. But that’s exactly the way it happened.

Carlo Lizzani

Hotel Meina   

Based on real events narrated in a book by Marco Nozza. Lake Maggiore, September 1943. A group of sixteen Italian Jews from Greece are guests Hotel Meina which is owned by Giorgio Benar, also a jew but who holds a Turkish passport (citizen of a neutral state). Following the armistice between Italy and the Allied Forces, a unit of the SS captained by Commander Krassler reaches Meina. Two young men, Noa Benar and Julien Fendez, are dragged from their loved ones by the brutal eruption of the arrival of the Nazi squadron. The Jews are blocked in the hotel and so begins a week of waiting, terror and hope. It is a strange household of Jews, hotel guests and SS troops. A possible escape is discussed. The Germans themselves are awaiting orders. Perhaps the end of the war is nigh for them too. But then there is an escalation which leads to a massacre. The SS retrieve the Jews in small groups and take them out of the hotel to be interrogated – or so they say – in the nearby town of Baveno. However they are slaughtered and their bodies thrown in a lake. Vain are the attempts to save them by an anti-Nazi who operates between Switzerland and Italy. The last ones to be killed by Nazi bullets are Julien Fendez, his two young brothers and his grandfather. When he realises there is no hope of saving them, Noa manages to escape to Switzerland with his parents and younger brother.

Wes Anderson

Hotel Chevalier

Set in a hotel room in France, it is the brief coda to a doomed romance and the prologue to The Darjeeling Limited.