DUBAI: A number of films from the Middle East have been announced as part of this year’s Venice International Film Festival lineup.
Algerian-born filmmaker Rachid Hami’s “For My Country,” Syrian filmmaker Soudade Kaadan’s “Nezouh” and Iraqi filmmaker Ahmed Yassin Al-Daradji’s debut feature-length film “Hanging Gardens” are set to screen during the festival in September, among other titles from the region.
Director Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise” has been selected to open the festival on Aug. 31, festival director Alberto Barbera said Monday, the Associated Press reported.
Baumbach wrote and directed the film, which looks at the contemporary American family through the lens of a professor, Jack Gladney, and his fourth wife, Babette. Greta Gerwig, who has a child with Baumbach, stars alongside Adam Driver, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy and Jodie Turner-Smith.
“It is a great honor to open the 79th Venice Film Festival with ‘White Noise,’” Barbera said. “Baumbach has made an original, ambitious and compelling piece of art which plays with measure on multiple registers: dramatic, ironic, satirical. The result is a film that examines our obsessions, doubts, and fears as captured in the 1980s, yet with very clear references to contemporary reality.”
The Netflix-produced film will be among those competing for the Golden Lion award, selected by a jury led by Julianne Moore, and a likely player in the awards season to come.
