Reading about the glittering world premieres taking place at the Venice Film Festival is sure to give you some major FOMO. We’d all love to check out the latest Pablo Larraín film starring Natalie Portman (Jackie) or Antoine Fuqua’s take on The Magnificent Seven. Then again, one of the joys of attending film festivals is finding those films under everyone’s radar that introduce you to new talents. And with Festival Scope, that’s precisely what you can do from the comfort of your own home.
Partnering with the Venice Film Festival for the fifth year in a row, the fest streaming service will be making available 18 titles in their Venice Sala Web platform. This commitment to entering the 21st century is clearly in the mind of the fest director, Alberto Barbera: “We believe film festivals can always find new ways to reach international audiences, and that is specially true thanks to the new technologies. Sala Web is a key example of it, as it allows filmmakers find their public beyond all frontiers, something impossible only a few years ago. As the first film festival in history, the Venice Film Festival needs to be part of this new story that is being told.”
Among those titles being spotlit by Venice Sala Web are a handful of Latin American films. Fresh off the announcement that From Afar has been chosen to represent Venezuela as their Best Foreign Language Film submission film for the Oscars next year, director Lorenzo Vigas will be premiering a more personal project in Italy: El vendedor de orquídeas (The Orchid Seller). The documentary is a portrait of the director’s father, painter Oswaldo Vigas as he tries to recover a painting he’d lost as a teenager.
Also from Venezuela is Jorge Thielen Armand’s La soledad (The Solitude). Set in modern day Caracas, La soledad follows a father who finds out the decrepit mansion where he and his family have been squatting will soon be demolished. His solution? To find the hidden stash of gold that’s rumored to be buried in the walls of the house. The kicker is that it’s a real story being acted out by the very people it’s based on.
If you wanted something a bit more outré, look no further than Gastón Solnicki’s Kékszakállú. The doc-like feature is an Argentine refashioning of Bela Bartok’s sole opera based on the Bluebeard fable of the same name. Shot in Buenos Aires and Punta del Este, Solnicki’s dreamlike project is a portrait of several young women that ends up looking like a dissection of contemporary Argentina.
And finally, co-directors Verena Kuri and Sofía Brockenshire also look into the lives of young women in Argentina with their film Una hermana (One Sister). Following a young woman in search of her sister who’s disappeared, Una hermana weaves a mysterious tale that gets all the more complicated once her family’s car appears in flames on the bank of a nearby river.
As a special treat for Remezcla readers, you can enter to win a Festival Pass of 5 tickets to watch the films from the Venice Film Festival on Festival Scope for free! Or, starting, September 1st, you can buy your own. Just remember, only 400 digital tickets will be available for each film so be sure to purchase yours as soon as possible!
Venice Sala Web kicks off September 1, 2016. The Venice Film Festival runs August 31 – September 10. Sign up here for free tickets.