What follows is nothing short of staggering: as a celebration of their seventieth anniversary, the Venice International Film Festival commissioned seventy filmmakers with recent festival contributions to create shorts which help form Venezia 70 – Future Reloaded, a project that, in its full state, is something of a tapestry of current world cinema. The list of contributors would include Abbas Kiarostami, Bernardo Bertolucci, Todd Solondz, Sion Sono, Catherine Breillat, Lav Diaz, Paul Schrader, Claire Denis, Jazmín López (Leones), Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Yorgos Lanthimos, Jia Zhangke, Ulrich Seidl, Walter Salles, Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg), Hong Sang-soo, and Pablo Larraín (No), yet this venerable selection would not even account for half of Future Reloaded‘s line-up.
There’s nowhere to start, really, so one might as well get going with a few that have been provided here. The bit with Schrader walking around, cameras strapped to his body as he delivers a monologue, is endlessly amusing, while Kiarostami‘s segment is, too, quite funny, acting as a recreation of the Lumière brothers‘ The Sprinkler Sprinkled. (Somehwat fitting, given his involvement with 1995’s Lumière and Company.) While others are somewhat confounding, a few more more frustrating, none that I’ve seen are actually disappointing or, in any sense, unworthy of attention. Future Reloaded is a real accomplishment, and that we can see the entire set right on our computers is a true gift.
Begin a look below, then see the rest on their YouTube channel:
Which pieces were you particularly impressed by?