‘Tar’ leads Venice pics in Queer Lion race

Since 2007, Venice’s Queer Lion Award has mirrored and elevated one of the best in LGBTQ cinema. Fifteen years later, founder Daniel N. Casagrande stated this 12 months’s Venice Film Festival shall be “essentially the most queer version ever.”

Among the many fest’s 30 LGBTQ-themed titles, 19 are competing for the Queer Lion, together with a document six movies from the primary competitors. They embrace Todd Subject’s orchestra conductor drama “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett; Darren Aronofsky’s estranged homosexual father research “The Whale,” that includes Brendan Fraser; Laura Poitras’ doc “All of the Magnificence and the Bloodshed,” chronicling bisexual artist Nan Goldin’s life and anti-opioid campaign; Andrea Pallaoro’s trans lady household drama “Monica”; Emanuele Crialese’s “L’immensità,” starring Penélope Cruz because the mom of a transgender baby; and Gianni Amelio’s “Il signore delle formiche,” the true story of an Italian artist jailed below an notorious anti-gay regulation.

With a median of eight to 10 nominees annually, why are twice that quantity now in competitors? “In previous editions, I requested if there weren’t extra movies of LGBTQ curiosity submitted for the pageant,” Casagrande defined. Loads have been, however the challenge was their “decrease high quality” in comparison with different Venice alternatives. He thinks this 12 months’s higher, bigger crop is “undoubtedly an indication that LGBTQ themes, tales and characters are much less perceived as a problematic stigma, and extra as an integral a part of society. I’m inclined to learn these numbers as a part of an ongoing pattern.”

Again in 2003, movie critic/journalist Casagrande requested the Venice director on the time, Moritz de Hadeln, if he’d prefer to create an honor just like the queer-themed Teddy Award, which was established when he was director of the Berlinale in 1987. “The reply was a heat ‘sure,’ so together with my present right-hand man Marco Busato and Franco Grillini, I began engaged on the mission,” Casagrande stated. It hit a pace bump when De Hadeln was changed by Marco Müller, who “unconditionally endorsed” the award however took a couple of years to launch it.

Casagrande and Busato select nominees by asking Venice’s choice committees which movies have LGBTQ themes central to the plot, a typically bumpy course of. “To be sincere, we’re nonetheless looking for out if each of Cate Blanchett’s [“Tár” love interests] are feminine, or solely considered one of them,” Busato stated with fun earlier than the pageant. This 12 months’s jurors are linked with the pageant, however previous years have included journalists, critics, administrators corresponding to filmmaker Tinto Brass (“Caligula”) and the primary all-female jury in 2021.

The founders recalled a couple of comedian moments through the years. “I like to recollect a really laid-back Brian De Palma who, throughout the press convention for [his 2012 lesbian-themed thriller] “Ardour,” declared himself certain of profitable the Queer Lion,” Casagrande stated with amusement.

The award had its share of controversy, together with early assaults from Italian newspaper Libero and Iranian web site Baztab. However so far as Casagrande is aware of, just one movie was taken out of competition for the award. That was in 2007 when the Italian PR reps of “Sukiyaki Western Django” requested them to take away it from competition, claiming “it was ‘not of queer curiosity’. And we have been glad to oblige,” Casagrande stated.

The Queer Lion has honored options with big-name expertise (Tom Ford’s “A Single Man,” Tom Hooper’s “The Danish Lady”) and filmmakers like 2009 Profession Achievement award winner Ang Lee. This 12 months, that honor — the second ever introduced — will go to “Casa Susanna” author/director Sébastien Lifshitz on the Sept. 9 awards ceremony. However Casagrande appears proudest of its capability to launch small indies to extra fests and awards, citing Li Cheng’s “José” and Kuba Czekaj’s particular point out honoree “Child Bump.”

“The award has modified the considering of some producers and distributors, who at first feared having their films been labeled as ‘homosexual movies,’” he stated. “The Queer Lion has helped open the mindset of the movie trade in the direction of new paths. And regardless of enormous progress, there are nonetheless many ‘fragile’ LGBTQ works in want of assist and visibility.”