Culture critic Chris Vognar is at the Venice Film Festival participating in a panel discussion on the Biennale College, a higher-education training workshop for the development and production of micro-budget feature-length films. He will be reporting from Venice for the next week.
The Venice Film Festival unfolds with an intriguing combination of the casual and the formal. Folks definitely dress up, and there's security everywhere. The major venues, most of which sit right off the beach, are opulent. But it's also easy to see famous people just chilling with the public. Cuing up to see the premiere of Beasts of No Nation Thursday night at the Sala Grande I saw a familiar looking bearded gentleman from the corner of my eye. It was Jake Gyllenhaal, chatting with some friends, waiting to get into the movie like the rest of us. OK, so they let him in before the rest of us. But still.
The film is a showcase for Idris Elba, recently deemed too "street" to play James Bond by 007 author Anthony Horowitz, and young Abraham Attah, who plays a child separated from his family in an unnamed African country and trained to kill for a guerrilla army. Elba plays his commandant, a character both terrifying and avuncular, a master of the carrot and the stick. Cary Fukunaga adapted Uzodinwa Iweala's novel, directed, and shot the thing to boot, showing the same visual panache he brought to the first season of True Detective.
After the movie Fukunaga hugged Attah as man and boy basked in the thunderous applause. They were very much out in the open, in the balcony but still part of the crowd, accepting hugs and handshakes all around.
