Italy plays four cards at Venice Film Festival

(ANSA) - Rome, August 31 - Four Italian directors are in competition at the 72nd Venice Film Festival, plucked from a wider selection of others that weren't chosen, including films by big names such as Paolo Sorrentino, Nanni Moretti, and Matteo Garrone.
    In response to the inevitable controversy over the films by those directors being passed over, festival director Alberto Barbera told ANSA, "the juries are unpredictable".
    Heading to the Lido, then, are films by directors Marco Bellocchio, Luca Guadagnino, Piero Messina, and Giuseppe Gaudino.
    Bellocchio's "Sangue Del Mio Sangue" (Blood of My Blood), starring Roberto Herlitzka, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, Filippo Timi, and Alba Rohrwacher, tells the story of a 17th-century nun, Benedetta (played by Lidiya Liberman), condemned to live within the walls of an ancient prison after seducing a pair of twins, one of whom is a priest. The prison is in Bobbio, where Bellocchio was born.
    Guadagnino's entry, "A Bigger Splash," on the other hand, is an erotic and tragic film starring Matthias Schoenaerts as Paul and Tilda Swindon as Marianne, an American couple on vacation in Italy, thrown into difficulty when Marianne invites her former lover, played by Ralph Fiennes, and his daughter, played by Dakota Johnson, to join them.
    "L'Attesa" (The Wait) is Piero Messina's feature-film directing debut. A graduate of Rome's Experimental Film Centre, and a former assistant director to Paolo Sorrentino, Messina wrote the story of Anna and Jeanne, two women in a small Sicilian villa awaiting Giuseppe, son of the former and girlfriend of the latter. The women, played by French actresses Juliette Binoche and Lou De Laage, get to know each other over the days of waiting, and the story leads to a traditional Easter procession in the center of the small village. In "Per Amor Vostro", Valerina Golino plays the tormented wife of a member of the Naples Camorra mafia. A mother of three sons, she is so unhappy in her life that she has ceased to see in color, and has lost herself through her love for others, until the story takes a turn towards her redemption.
    There are also three Italian films in the "Out of Competition" lineup and two in the "Horizons" category. Photo: a scene from Bellocchio's Sangue del mio Sangue