11. Queer Lion Award: films in competition

Pala Biennale, Lido di Venezia

Cast, credits and synopses of the 7 movies in competition for Queer Lion Award 2017; and the calendar with the screening schedule during the Venice Film Festival

Una famiglia by Sebastiano Riso with Micaela Ramazzotti, Patrick Bruel (Italy, 105’)
Vincent is fifty, born near Paris; Maria, fifteen years younger, grew up in Ostia. Both cut relationships off with their families, but together they are a couple leading a secluded existence in Rome, an ideal cradle for those who want to live away from prying eyes. Yet, to a more attentive look, scratching the surface of that normal life, reveals a terrible project brought forth by him with shrewd determination and accepted by Maria, due to her unconditional love: A project to help couples who can not have children. Getting to what her instinct tells her to be the last pregnancy, Maria decides it’s time to form a true family. This choice leads to an inevitable consequence: the rebellion to Vincent, the man of his life.
Presented in Venezia 74

Marvin by Anne Fontaine with Finnegan Oldfield, Isabelle Huppert (France, 115’)
Written by Anne Fontaine and Pierre Trividic, the story revolves around Martin Clément, born Marvin Bijou, who ran away from his hometown and his family. He retells his story through a stage play that proves to be a smash hit. But at what price? Interestingly, while the film borrows its central plot from the novel by Edouard Louis (which outlines the childhood and teenage years of a young boy in a village, where he is shunned by the inhabitants and even by his own family when he comes out as a homosexual), it simultaneously takes the story a littler further, as the movie follows the character until the age of 23, whereas the storyline of the book comes to a halt when he starts secondary school. Delving into the topics of stigmatisation just because someone is different and the building of one’s identity, the plot also shows how the character eventually manages to dig himself out of a very distressing situation thanks to his various encounters.
Presented in Orizzonti

The Prince and the Dybbuk by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski (Poland, Germany, 82’) doc
“The Prince and the Dybbuk” is a documentary film about Mosze Waks. Born in a poor family in a small Jewish shtetl in Ukraine, he dies in Madrid as the prince Michael Waszyński, Hollywood film producer and Polish aristocrat in exile. Along the way, in his colourful life, he assists Friedrich Murnau with the making of the film “Nosferatu,” infuriates the Third Reich’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, with his film “The Dybbuk,” and produces the most expensive motion picture in the history of cinema, “The Fall of the Roman Empire.” Those who had the opportunity to come across him, remembered him as an aristocrat, a lover of luxury, a liar, the wandering Jew and open homosexual and the husband of an Italian countess in one person.
Presented in Venezia Classici

Martyr by Mazen Khaled with Carole Abboud, Hamza Mekdad (Lebanon, 80’)
Boys in Beirut take dangerous dives in the sea as part of an initiation. A young man’s tragic death causes his friends to grapple with loss and to partake in his community’s rites and ceremonies, and exposes the city’s schisms and its society’s fault lines.
Presented in Biennale College

Il contagio by Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini with Anna Foglietta, Vincenzo Salemme (Italy, 110’)
Marcello, Chiara, Mauro and Simona all live troubled lives in the same building on the outskirts of the city, along with the local ringleader, Carmine. Into the shifting sands of this perennially tragicomic humanity steps an eminently bourgeois professor and writer, Walter, who’s been conducting an affair with Marcello. While Marcello is a former bodybuilder unsure of his own sexuality, it is only Mauro, a coldly ambitious drug dealer, who seems to want things to change, as corruption and the powers behind it arrive in the ‘hood’.
Presented in Giornate degli Autori

Les garçons sauvages by Bertrand Mandico with Vimala Pons, Diane Rouxel (France, 110’)
At the beginning of the 20th century, on the island of La Réunion, five adolescents of good families enamoured with the occult, commit a savage crime. A Dutch Captain takes them in charge for a repressive cruise on a haunted, dilapidated sailboat. Exhausted by the Captain’s methods, the five boys prepare to mutiny. Their port of call is a supernatural island with luxuriant vegetation and bewitching powers that holds a disturbing secret. The main characters are gender-bending persons, who accept the idea of becoming “else” as a form of erotism.
Presented in Settimana Internazionale della Critica

Team Hurricane by Annika Berg with Eja Penelope Roepstorff, Ida Glitre (Denmark, 94’)
A punk chick flick about straight and lesbian teen girls that mixes highly stylized fictional elements with documentary material: loneliness, pussy-power, Kawaii, electric green, hentai, graffiti, vibrators, friendship, teddy bears, resting bitch face, ART, fire, fear, bubble-gum, mom & dad, anorexia, cactuses, homemade piercings, nail art, cherries, cutting, dolphins, Lolita, secret diaries and daydreaming. Radical girls in an ordinary world.
Presented in Settimana Internazionale della Critica

CALENDAR WITH THE SCREENING SCHEDULE

MARTYR
Sep 01 | 11:00 Sala Giardino (Lido) | Press, Industry
Sep 01 | 17:00 Sala Giardino (Lido) | Tickets, All Accreditations
Sep 01 | 21:00 Sala Web | Ticktes
Sep 02 | 20:00 Sala Pasinetti (Lido) | Free Coupons, All Accreditations

IL CONTAGIO
Sep 01 | 11:30 Sala Perla (Lido) | Press, Industry
Sep 01 | 16:45 Sala Perla (Lido) | Free Coupons, All Accreditations
Sep 02 | 21:30 Sala Rossini 3 (Venezia) | Ticktes
Sep 02 | 21:30 IMG Cinemas 2 (Mestre) | Ticktes

MARVIN
Sep 02 | 20:00 Sala Volpi (Lido) | Press, Industry
Sep 02 | 22:15 Sala Casinò (Lido) | Press, Industry
Sep 03 | 16:30 Sala Darsena (Lido) | Ticktes, All Accreditations
Sep 04 | 14:45 Sala PalaBiennale (Lido) | Ticktes, All Accreditations
Sep 04 | 21:30 Sala Rossini 3 (Venezia) | Ticktes
Sep 04 | 21:30 Sala IMG Cinemas 2 (Mestre) | Ticktes

UNA FAMIGLIA
Sep 04 | 09:00 Sala Grande (Lido) | Press, Industry
Sep 04 | 11:00 Sala Darsena (Lido) | Press, Industry
Sep 04 | 17:45 Sala Grande (Lido) | Ticktes, All Accreditations
Sep 04 | 22:05 Sala PalaBiennale (Lido) | Ticktes
Sep 05 | 08:30 Sala PalaBiennale (Lido) | All Accreditations

LES GARÇONS SAUVAGES
Sep 04 | 19:45 Sala Perla 2 (Lido) | Press, Industry
Sep 05 | 14:00 Sala Perla (Lido) | Free Coupons, All Accreditations
Sep 06 | 09:00 Sala Perla (Lido) | Free Coupons, All Accreditations

TEAM HURRICANE
Sep 05 | 19:45 Sala Perla 2 (Lido) | Press, Industry
Sep 06 | 14:00 Sala Perla (Lido) | Free Coupons, All Accreditations
Sep 07 | 09:00 Sala Perla (Lido) | Free Coupons, All Accreditations
Sep 07 | 21:30 Sala Rossini 3 (Venezia) | Ticktes
Sep 07 | 21:30 Sala IMG Cinemas 2 (Mestre) | Ticktes

THE PRINCE AND THE DYBBUK
Sep 06 | 11:15 Sala Volpi | Press, Industry
Sep 06 | 17:30 Sala Volpi | Free Coupons, All Accreditations
Sep 07 | 22:00 Sala Pasinetti | Free Coupons, All Accreditations

Free coupons for Martyr, Il contagio, Les Garçons sauvages, The Prince and the Dybbuk will be available at the Biennale ticket counters, open from 8am.
Info biglietteria.cinema@labiennale.org