Catherine Breillat’s latest, “Sleeping Beauty,” and South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s “Oki’s Movie” have been announced as the opening and closing films of the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section. The festival – which runs September 1-11, 2010 – dedicates the section to “cutting-edge” cinema. Both films will be having their world premieres.
“Beauty,” Breillat’s second Charles Perrault adaptation after “Bluebeard,” was quoted by Venice as saying that unlike “Bluebeard,” she “would like to consider this fairytale not as a story that two girls tell each other, but as the story of a girl being born (she does not yet know into what world), and creates her own little girl’s world. Childhood is a long and ruthless limbo that precedes adolescence – even if that is precisely when the fairytale beginning of the story is set. Hence the girl grows little by little and becomes an adolescent, who naively believes that she knows everything about life. But life is not a fairytale, and love during adolescence is like early motherhood, which leads to a different life reality. It ‘brings your feet back on the ground,’ as they say. It is therefore no longer a fairytale, but an account of a life that is beginning.'”
“Oki’s Movie” follows Hong Sang-soo’s “Hahaha,” which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes earlier this year. Venice deemed him “the real founder of the new Korean cinema” and described it as renewing “Hong’s obsession with complex narrative plots.” Divided into four chapters, the film “follows a young filmmaker, his old professor of cinema, and the beautiful Oki, caught between the two men, are the protagonists of this story developing between present and past, reality and cinematic fiction.”
Both films will be in competition for the new prizes reserved for feature-length films (Orizzonti Award and Special Orizzonti Jury Prize) in the section that this year will be open to all “custom-format” works.
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
