Venice’s Orizzonti Has a Jury, Wants to ‘Cut’ to the Chase

Similar to the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, or the Visions and Vanguard programmes at TIFF, Venice has their own special sidebar for the more experimental folk on the cinema stage, called Orizzonti (Horizons). Last year saw some pretty heavy titles in this section, including Catherine Breillat’s dream fable Sleeping Beauty, José Luis Guerín’s local colour doc Guest, Hong Sang-soo’s quadrant-structured Oki’s Movie, and Patrick Keiller’s continuation of his heady essay films with Robinson in Ruins. The full announcement for this year’s edition will be dropping in the coming weeks, but today saw the unveiling of the jury, as well as their opening film, which will be Iranian filmmaker Amir Nedari’s Cut.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose masterful and lethargic Syndromes and Century played in the 2006 main competition, had already been crowned jury prez some four weeks ago, but has been forced to drop out for unspecified reasons (let’s hope it’s because his hands are dirty with that Tilda Swinton/pig movie). Replacing him on the throne is 2006 competition alum Jia Zhang-ke (Still Life), who will be joined by the Tate Modern’s film curator Stuart Comer, French architect Odile Decq, Egyptian producer and director Marianne Khoury (Women Who Loved Cinema), and Italian film editor and director Jacopo Quadri (edited the haunting El sicario: Room 164, which, probably not coincidentally, was in last year’s Orrizonti).

An Iranian film that’s allegedly a ‘love letter to Japan, cinema, and yakuza’, the selection of Cut effectively kills two birds with one stone when it comes to tipping the cap to international current events. Yakuza, of course, is the highly energetic and influential Japanese genre that focuses on organized crime gangs and stylized violence (Criterion’s Eclipse label devoted a very nice package to some classic yakuza films with their Nikkatsu Noirset). Naderi appeared in the 2008 competition with Vegas: Based On a True Story, which has gone and disappeared off the face of the earth in the interim. Check back for the full line-up shortly.