Venice Celebrates 70th Anni With ‘Future Reloaded’ Shorts
ROME — The Venice Film Festival is celebrating its upcoming 70th edition with 70 shorts on the future of filmmaking each from a different auteur all over the world.
Names of participating helmers, who have been invited to make a short between 60 and 90 seconds long, in total creative freedom, will be revealed gradually through August 27 on a new web page dedicated to the fest’s history on the fest’s website http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/history/.
The first batch of helmers who will contribute to Venice’s Future Reloaded initiative are Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Schrader, Shekhar Kapur, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abbas Kiarostami, Walter Salles and Monte Hellman (above screen grab).
The invitation has been accepted by great maestros, well-known directors, and young filmmakers of recognized talent. All have been at Venice at least once over the past 20 years.
Future Reloaded is being billed as both a collective movie tribute to the world’s oldest festival and a reflection on the future of cinema, as filtered through the personal artistic insight of each of the participating directors.
All these shorts will be given a first public screening at the Lido during the fest’s 70th edition, which runs August 28-September 7.
The Future Reloaded website will provide profiles of each participating director and will also be updated daily with rare photos and unique documents conserved at the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), as well as with 40 “capsules” taken from old films preserved at Rome’s Archivio Storico Istituto Luce Cinecitta archives documenting the various editions of the Venice Film Festival, from the very first in 1932.
“By combining the directors of the new short films with historical tidbits, Future Reloaded brings together the past and the future of cinema — and of the festival,” the festival, headed by Alberto Barbera, said in a statement.
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