Venice, 16th July 2008
The jury members have been chosen for the International Jury of the Orizzonti section in the 65th Venice Film Festival (27 August - 6 September 2008), directed by Marco Müller and organised by La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta.
The President of the International Jury for Orizzonti, the section that has for the past four years focused on the latest trends of a cinema suspended between fiction and documentary, will be Belgian film-maker and artist, Chantal Akerman, who has made some of the most challenging and hard-to-classify films of recent years, films falling midway between documentary, experimentation and video-art. Discovering and exploring new cinematic terrain on the border between reality and fiction, Chantal Akerman stands out for her acute analysis of human behavior through an investigative approach with regard to apparently insignificant facts, taking realism and abstraction to their extreme consequences.
The other members of the jury are: French film critic Nicole Brenez, one of the most authoritative in the international scene; Italian actress and documentarist Barbara Cupisti, winner this year of the David di Donatello for best documentary with Madri (presented in 2007 at the Festival in the Orizzonti section); Spanish director, Jose Luis Guerin, always interested in the experimental documentary aspects of cinema, as shown in his In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia), presented last year in competition; and the young Estonian director, Veiko Õunpuu, last year’s winner of the Orizzonti prize in Venice with his debut feature film, Autumn Ball (Sügisball).
The Jury will assign the Orizzonti Prize and the Orizzonti Doc Prize from among the feature films selected for the Orizzonti section. The winning films to date in this section have been: The grand Sons (Les Petits Fils) by Ilan Duran Cohen (Orizzonti Prize 2004), Vento di Terra by Vincenzo Marra (Special Mention Orizzonti 2004), East Of Paradise by Lech Kowalski (Orizzonti Prize 2005), First on the Moon (Pervye na lune) by Aleksey Fedortchenko (Orizzonti Doc Prize 2005), Courthouse on Horseback (Mabei shang de fating) by Liu Jie (Orizzonti Prize 2006), When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts by Spike Lee (Orizzonti Doc Prize 2006), Autumn Ball (Sügisball) by Veiko Õunpuu (Orizzonti Prize 2007), Useless (Wuyong) by Jia Zhang-ke (Orizzonti Doc Prize 2007), Death in the Land of Encantos (Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga engkanto) by Lav Diaz (Special Mention Orizzonti 2007).
Biographical notes
Chantal Akerman – President of the Jury – (Brussels, Belgium, 1950), director and artist, has gained a reputation for an investigative eye, able to draw out the drama of existence from an acute and prolonged observation of reality. Known for her experimental style (absence of action, suspension of movement, temporal abstractions) and for her disenchanted sense of humour, she explores complex themes such as identity, sexuality, memory and politics. After attending the Jewish school, she entered the INSAS (Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle) in Brussels. Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) was to prove a great influence on the 15-year-old Akerman, as would the films of Robert Bresson, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Yasujirō Ozu, with regard to the fixed viewpoints, dilated time, sparse dialogue, empty spaces, and symmetry of composition in the image. Her first short film, Saute ma ville (1968), is a burlesque tragedy in Chaplinesque mood, in which the protagonist (Akerman herself) sets off a chain reaction after her oven explodes, causing the entire city to blow up.
In 1971, after having filmed her second short, L’enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée, she moved to New York to work with Samy Szlingerbaum. In the Big Apple, she began to frequent the Anthology Film Archives, came into contact with the New American Cinema of New York and developed an interest above all for the work of Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas. Here she directed two further experimental shorts and her first feature film, Hotel Monterey (1972), on the vicissitudes of a squalid hotel on 94th Street.
