The third day on the 75th Venice Film Festival, a.k.a. Gaga Day as it humorously got referred to by the thousands of festival attendees, was marked by the arrival off Lady Gaga, starring alongside Bradley Cooper in a remake of the original 1937 A star is born, also a directorial debut for Cooper.      Gaga’s arrival on the Lido posing on the Vaporetto made the headlines, while the first screening with its loud rock tunes put the pop star higher up in her fans adoration,...

It’s this time of the year, when the film elite gathers on a tiny island in Venice to celebrate cinema over gelato, pizza and spritz. And for the last decade, to have a preview of pretty much 80% of the future Oscar nominees and winners, to come in few months time.    And this year, the stars have aligned again for the Mostra Del Cinema of the Venice Biennale, with the 75th edition’s competition being the most exciting one could wish for.      The fest...

by Martin I. Petrov  One of the highlights of the competition at the 74th Venice Film Festival is definitely British director Andrew Haigh's new film 'Lean on Pete', starring young US talent Charlie Plummer alongside Chloe Savigny. The film tells the story of a 16 year old Charlie, who grows up with a single dad and yet in a relatively healthy family environment. One day he meets a local race horse owner, who happens to need an apprentice and Charlie soon becomes fascinated w...

  Lao pao er (Mr. Six) by Chinese director Guan Hu is the closing film of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival. The screening is scheduled on 12 September at 9:00 pm in the Sala Grande theater at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido.  The film is the story of Mr. Six, a notorious streetwise hooligan in Beijing when he was young. After 30 years, he is diagnosed with heart disease and lives by himself in a hutong. One day, his son, Xi...

Tuesday September 1st, Sala Darsena (Palazzo del Cinema) at Lido di Venezia - Pre-Opening of the 72nd Venice Film Festival entirely dedicated to Orson Welles, for the centennial of his birth, and to two of his “Venetian” masterpieces inspired by Shakespeare and remarkably found and restored – The Merchant of Venice (1969, a film that was thought to have been lost) and Otello (1951) ...

70th Venice Film Festival Winners Announced By Liza Foreman The 70th Venice Film Festival came to a close Saturday night with a raft of prizes awarded here on the Lido by a jury headed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The main prize, the Golden Lion, went to Sacro Gra by Gianfranco Rosi, while Best Director went to one of the hottest titles from the festival, Miss Violence, and director Alexandros Avranas. The Grand Jury prize prize went to Tsai Ming-...

The Signature Sketch collection of caricature filmic moments in the festival community... "I enjoyed Venice 2013 very much; I am happy to share these sketches in exclusivity with filmfestivals.com. I storyboard, and design film and tv sets. My sketchbooks are full of the character and environment settings of both cinema and literary worlds, they are my own original storyboard collection of festival travel sketches, with pen and paper." Nesta's Sketch Collection covers The&n...

"Covariance" received its 24th festival acceptance from the 63rd annual Mostra Internazionale di Film in Montecatini, Italy for October 25-27, 2012. The film stars David Razowsky and Dawn Westlake. Cinematography was by Francesco Uboldi. Editing by Brandon Bondehagen. Original music was provided by Gregory Johnson of Acoustic Labs. The film has so far received three nominations for Best Film at festivals in South Africa, Brazil and Rwanda, and a nomination of Best Act...

Today, under the auspices of the 66th Mostra, the European Parliament unveiled the three contending films for the LUX Prize 2009: Eastern Plays (Kamen Kalev), Sturm (Hans-Christian Schmid) and Welcome (Philippe Lioret) will compete for the film prize that has been awarded by the European Parliament to a European co-production for the last two years. For the winner, the LUX Prize 2009 (lux is the Latin word for light), worth about 87,000 Euros, will finance subtitling in the EU's...

  Biennale Cinema  65th Venice Film Festival  We resolved, for this new-four years mandate of the Cinema Section of La Biennale (for this 65th Venice Mostra), to stop, once and for all, looking at the cinema as if it were an infallible compass. No longer did we want to ask the cinema to rescue us from a problematic, ambivalent, ambiguous present: it was up to us, instead, to stay in there, not to...