Gaia Furrer will never forget her first edition as Artistic Director of Venice’s Giornate degli Autori, mainly because she kept thinking it might not happen at all.
It was in 2020. “Up until the start of the festival, I was expecting a phone call saying they were pulling the plug,” Furrer tells The Film Verdict.
“It was very emotional to introduce the very first screening, with Andrea Purgatori by my side, as he had been appointed almost at the same time as me,” she says, referring to the Giornate’s late President, the acclaimed journalist and screenwriter who passed away in July. The Giornate also lost another of its legendary founders, Cito Maselli, this year. “There were a few setbacks, such as not being able to have certain directors in attendance because of lockdown rules, but overall I look back on those 2020 days quite fondly.”
One memorable incident involved the premiere screening of the Franco-Algerian film Honey Cigar, with one attending member of the press not realizing the director, first-timer Kamir Aïnouz, was not to be mistaken for her similarly named brother (and fellow filmmaker) Karim. “That was hilarious, it may have been the most shared moment of the festival, because Kamir posted the video of that moment all over social media.”
While the Venice Film Festival as a whole turned 90 last year (and is celebrating its 80th edition this year), the Giornate are also in a somewhat celebratory mood as they turn 20, although their shindigs are a much more muted affair.
Furrer explains: “We are showing the restored print of Jean-Marc Valleé’s C.R.A.Z.Y. on the 31st, because he meant a lot to the Giornate, and we’ve always had a strong bond with filmmakers from Québec. But we’re not making a big deal out of the anniversary or trying to get more media attention, because that’s not who we are. If we wanted that, we could have slotted Sidonie au Japon, starring Isabelle Huppert, as our opening film.” The French actress will be attending the premiere, and Peter Sarsgaard will also be Lido-bound for the section’s closing movie, Coup!. Because it’s an independent production, Sarsgaard – also one of the producers – will not be affected by the rules of the current SAG-AFTRA strike, which did not impact the Giornate line-up in the slightest.
“We barely screen any American movies, so we didn’t have any issues like the Official Selection did.” In fact, part of Furrer’s philosophy is to give the Giornate their own identity, with a more varied selection. “I don’t have a checklist of countries to specifically include each year,” she says, “but we do try to go beyond the triangle of Italy, France and the US, which are conspicuously represented at festivals in general and Venice in particular.”
The aforementioned Québec, for example, birthed the film with the single coolest title of the entire festival: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. “It’s all in the title,” Furrer points out, “although there is a bit more to it than that. I’m curious to see the other vampire movies across the rest of the program, I think each section has one this year.”
Speaking of other sections, the notion of sidebars coexisting with the Official Selection is always a tricky one. How do the Giornate handle that balance? “Organizational matters aside, there’s no communication between us and the Official Selection. I do, however, keep in touch with Beatrice Fiorentino, who’s in charge of the International Critics Week. We do not talk about the selection process per se, but if there’s a film on both of our radars, we discuss it to figure out where it will play better. We both think that kind of cooperation is a good thing.”
