5 Key Moments at the Venice Film Festival

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Chloe Pirrie in AnOther Magazine A/W14
Chloe Pirrie in AnOther Magazine A/W14Photography by Gareth McConnell, Styling by Katie Shillingford

We mark the end of the Venice Film Festival with a round up of our five key moments

With the 71st Venice film festival closing at the weekend in a flurry of red carpets and awards, AnOther takes a look back over the fortnight and picks out the most memorable moments, ranging from cinematic highlights to disconcerting press conference non-appearances.

Debut: Blood Cells
The British road movie is a rare phenomenon in a crowded island lacking the sweeping horizons that usually form the backdrop for a dive into the unknown like Paris, Texas or Easy Rider. But the surprise gem of Venice came from debut feature Blood Cells, a dark, dreamlike tale tracing its lead character north to south through the murky edgelands, out-of-season seaside towns and bleakly beautiful landscapes of contemporary Britain in a way that has rarely been captured on film. Charismatic newcomer Barry Ward (fresh from his starring turn in Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall) has palpable screen presence as Adam, a rootless, lost soul reluctantly journeying home; through a handful of encounters with eccentric strangers and old friends, the secrets of his past begin to reveal themselves, building towards a powerful climax. Rising actress (and playwright) Hayley Squires is a revelation as his former girlfriend, breezing onto the screen with explosive results, while young actress Chloe Pirrie (shot by Gareth McConnell in AnOther’s new issue) makes a memorable supporting turn. Blood Cells was written and directed by young London-based filmmakers Joseph Bull and Luke Seomore (the latter also composed the film’s haunting score), and they’ve been rightly hailed as a distinctive new voice in British film.

Birdman
‘We're actors – we're the opposite of people.’ That line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead came to mind watching Birdman, the funny, sad and utterly brilliant New York-set comedy which crashed into Venice on a wave of ecstatic reviews. Making the mother of all comebacks, Michael Keaton stars as an ageing superhero actor trying to reinvent himself by staging an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story on Broadway. It’s a high-wire piece of directing from Alejandro González Iñárritu, constructed to look like a single take. And it’s full of brilliant performances, including Emma Stone, in ripped tights and bleached hair, who is brutally funny as Riggan's messed-up daughter, fresh out of rehab.

Hungry Hearts
This year, Venice lost a couple of Oscar-baity big autumn premieres to the New York Film Festival – David Fincher’s film of Gone Girl and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. But that left room on the red carpet for impressive indie American films from young talent. Best of all was the creepily claustrophobic Hungry Hearts, a New York psychological drama with echoes of Rosemary’s Baby. The film’s two leads deservedly won the festival’s best actor and actress prizes – Adam Driver and the incredible Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher. She plays a pregnant woman, a vegan, who develops a dangerous delusion that she needs to protect her baby from toxins in the environment and in food, and stops eating.

Olive Kitteridge
One thing we learned at Venice was that sometimes you see the best films on the TV. Frances McDormand, in town to receive the Venice Film Festival's Persol Tribute to Visionary (with Mr McDormand, aka Joel Coen clapping in the audience), screened her new HBO show Olive Kitteridge, based on the Pulitzer winning novel by Elizabeth Strout. McDormand optioned the book in 2009, which follows Olive and her family over 25 years in small-town American. McDormand spoke to journalists about why TV is better than film at giving actresses great roles: "Ninety minutes is not long enough to tell a female story. You can skim the surface in 90 minutes, but you can’t really get to the heart of anything."

Event: the Lars von Trier no-show-show
So, after making that Nazi joke at Cannes in 2011, controversial director Lars von Trier took a "vow of silence". He hasn’t given an interview since. But he did make a gimmicky appearance via iPad during the press conference in Venice at the premiere of the uncut five-and-a-half-hour version of 'Nymphomaniac' – which stars Charlotte Gainsbourg as a sex addict and Stellan Skarsgård as a man who listens to her story during one long night of the soul. The laptop was set up in front of Skarsgard, who had three ‘lifelines’ – if he got stuck on a question, he called von Trier. One member of the audience asked von Trier if he'd learned about women making the film. His answer: ‘No. I know everything about women.’ Von Trier also announced that his next project is an English language TV series, The House That Jack Built, due be aired in 2016.

Text by Norman Poole