‘It deals with my own blood, my inheritance’: Asia Argento on historical trauma in Death Has No Master

Cannes film festival: The actor’s role in Jorge Thielen Armand’s Venezuela-set surrealist thriller explores deep-rooted tensions of ownership and colonialism In Death Has No Master, Asia Argento stars as an anxious foreigner in Venezuela. Her character, Caro, is on a harried mission to reclaim inherited property from the local caretakers who still reside there. That’s the setup in a surrealist psychological thriller, in which Venezuelan-Canadian film-maker Jorge Thielen Armand unpacks personal history alongside deep-rooted and “eternal” tensions that still affect the country today. “The film has multiple layers of meaning,” says Armand, ahead of the film’s premiere in the director’s fortnight section at Cannes. “Recent events only make those multitudes greater.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/VutlFjb via IFTTT

Berlin film festival 2023 roundup – prestige, politics and ethical starpower

This year’s Berlinale continued the tradition of combining earnestness with red-carpet glamour – featuring Kristen Stewart, Bono and Steven Spielberg, and this time some real crowd pleasers

Berlin may not be as glitzy as the other big European festivals, Cannes and Venice, but it knows how to make the most of what you might call “ethical starpower”. Hence Steven Spielberg, present this year to accept the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, who made an eloquent and imposing speech about longevity, healing and – as befits the locale – the weight of history. And hence serious-minded Hollywood actor Kristen Stewart heading a jury including Iranian-French star Golshifteh Farahani and previous Berlinale-winning directors Carla Simón and Radu Jude – a lineup that seems highly likely to make some daring awards choices.

But there’s also that long-standing Berlinale tradition of combining red-carpet prestige with a certain earnestness that doesn’t always flourish on the screen. A prime example this year was Golda, a solemn, sluggish drama about Israeli premier Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war, with Helen Mirren giving a solid, thoughtful performance, only to be upstaged by her uncanny prosthetic makeup. And then there was Sean Penn’s documentary about Ukraine, Superpower, co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, in which an understandably starstruck encomium to Volodymyr Zelenskiy was overshadowed by much narcissistic hyperventilating about what an amazing thing it was to be Sean Penn caught up in the Whirlwind of History. It was a phenomenally gauche, ill-advised piece; by contrast, Eastern Front, from Ukraine itself, was the real deal, a sober, urgent, profoundly troubling documentary by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, based substantially on the latter’s footage, shot on duty with a volunteer medical crew.

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