This year’s Venice International Film Festival will go down in history for a few reasons, some too boring to list. The main reason this proved a landmark edition was the unbearable heat on the Lido, over 87 degrees in the shade each day, which if you factored in the high humidity and blood thirsty mosquitoes made the event a challenge.

What became quite obvious early on though is that the stars don’t sweat. Even though most of us common humans thought our phones were broken — listing the same scorching temperature each day, without relief in sight — from red carpet appearances to the press conferences, at photo calls and throughout their arrivals, Angelina Jolie, Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Brad Pitt and French actor Micha Lescot, among others, sported clothing which made us hot just looking at them. Perhaps that was the strategy all along.

As far as titles at this year’s festival, there were a few standouts, most of those screened Out of Competition, along with a lot of slow cinema. Unlike slow fashion, which helps the planet by avoiding waste created by buying and disposing with each passing trend, slow cinema features long stories, even longer runtimes and typically benefits none but the film makers. A bit like watching paint dry, but more expensive and self indulgent. Rest assured, you won’t read about those titles here.

Going into the festival, I felt a pang of excitement building for both Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, starring Daniel Craig, and Pablo Larraín’s Maria, which stars Jolie as the Greek grand dame of opera, Maria Callas. Guadagnino never disappoints and Queer ended up being a personal favorite, with costumes designed by Jonathan Anderson, of Loewe and JW Anderson fame, and perfectly understated performances by Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville and an unrecognizably plump and bearded Jason Schwartzman.

Maria was more tricky at first watch, though with time and after revisiting some documentaries made about La Callas, the film has grown to the top spots on my personal hit parade. Maria is in the same vein as Larraín’s previous biopics, Jackie and Spencer, something to be savored and enjoyed for its fantastical elements more than its true-to-life biographic accuracy. All three films also feature a star at its epicenter, and though Jolie is someone who we wouldn’t immediately think of as La Callas, the star has certainly experienced the same downfalls of success present in the Greek diva’s life.

As Jolie spoke to journalists during the official press conference for the film, the only time the media was allowed access to the cast and creatives of Maria, she admitted “there’s a lot I won’t say in this room that you probably know and assume,” when asked if she used her personal experience to fuel the character. The story of Maria takes place during the last seven days of Callas’s life, showing the diva as a vulnerable, thin, drug addicted woman who has lost her iconic voice. She lives in a huge apartment in Paris which feels more like a prison than a home, with her poodles, her butler and her housekeeper — played by Italian actors Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher. She seems to be finally free, of her controlling mother, her overbearing husband and the psychologically abusive Aristotle Onassis but is doused in quaaludes which she washes down with alcohol, and she imagines a journalist named after the drug Mandrax. This is Jolie’s Callas, as she presents the darkest depth of stardom to an audience which may or may not remember the singer’s beautiful voice, at her peak. And sporting a red lip worthy of her latest campaign for Tom Ford. But the genius of Larraín’s film is that you don’t have to, remember Callas that is, because Maria will make you want to discover the opera diva all over again. And thanks to Netflix buying the title for US distribution, you won’t have to wait long to do so.

Guagagnino’s Queer proved every bit the divisive title you’d expect it to be, from the film’s title. The story is based on the eponymous novel by William S. Burroughs, which was only published in 1985, years after the author penned it. Queer is of course autobiographical, it is a story based on Burroughs’ own life, but also somehow feels particularly personal for Guadagnino too. The film follows the story of American expat William Lee in 1940s Mexico City, who becomes infatuated with a younger man, who may or may not be gay too. The performances in it are sublime and Craig’s strong physicality blends so well with the vulnerability of this part, with Starkey totally understandable as the object of Lee’s lust. The film even features a brilliantly choreographed sequence of erotic ecstasy by the dance duo of Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, as the two men become part of each other in the Amazonian jungle — you’ll have to watch the film to understand. In fact, all the sex scenes in the film will blow everyone’s socks off, though the Venice Competition jury headed by Isabelle Huppert didn’t bestow any prizes on the film. While on the subject of sex, the other steaming hot title in Venice was Babygirl, directed by Dutch actress and filmmaker Halina Reijn and starring Nicole Kidman and Triangle of Sadness breakout hunk Harris Dickinson. At a festival where women characters were definitely taking control of their lives, and perhaps more importantly of their sex lives, my personal award for best happy ending went to Babygirl. I won’t give any of it away but let’s just say that while Kidman and Dickinson smoldered in their multiple onscreen sex games scenes, the story is more about getting what we want as women, within a balanced, long lasting relationship. And the award for best cinematic husband in the world goes to Antonio Banderas as Kidman’s hubby Jacob in the film. Again, a personal choice.

A sidebar into French cinema, as Emmanuel Mouret’s Trois Amies (“Three Friends”) turned out to be a personal favorite and yet another title in this year’s Venezia 81 Competition line up which, like Babygirl and Queer, didn’t secure any prizes come awards time. Perhaps this jury, where Huppert was joined, among others, by All of Us Strangers filmmaker Andrew Haigh, American writer and director James Gray, Cinema Paradiso Oscar winning director Giuseppe Tornatore and Polish helmer Agnieszka Holland, didn’t like the idea of woman power? I can’t imagine the jury sessions were quite animated, with Huppert giving directions. Perhaps as a group, the jury were simply all contemplating their own mortality and thus chose Pedro Almodóvar’s end of life drama The Room Next Door. While the film is gorgeous in looks and fashion choices, the latter courtesy of German costume designer Bina Daigeler, and stars two phenomenal actors of our time, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, The Room Next Door lacked Almodóvar’s usual tongue in cheek humor and joie de vivre. The Spanish helmer’s English language feature debut definitely didn’t feel like a Golden Lion top prize winning film, or part of the Almodóvar oeuvre. Maybe it was Moore who explained the choice best, during the film’s press conference days before the win. “We very rarely see a story about female friendship, and especially female friends who are older. I don’t know that there’s another filmmaker in the world who would do that other than Pedro,” she said. The friendship in the film is a powerful one, so perhaps this film requires another viewing as well, before making a final decision about it.

But back to Trois Amies, which stars a trio of great French actresses Camille Cottin, Sara Forestier and India Hair as the three women whose love lives intersect and interact, along with a quartet of actors who help make up the crème de la crème of French cinema at the moment — Grégoire Ludig, Damien Bonnard, Vincent Macaigne and Éric Caravaca. About his characters’ impossibly wrong choices, Mouret said “I like characters who make mistakes, start over, but continue making mistakes, like Buster Keaton when he falls and gets back up, one fall after the other, over and over again, but who keep going, without looking back, without blaming anyone.”

Three documentaries also captured audiences and my heart in Venice. Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller follows the true story of a woman in modern day China who hires a professional to go undercover and break up her husband's affair. The film is shot in such a phenomenally vibrant, elegant way that at times it is hard to imagine that each scene, each part of the story is unfolding right then and there, before the filmmaker’s and audience’s very eyes, as it happened. When I sat down in Lo in Venice, she confirmed that she took a kind of “fly on the wall” approach to filming and followed the story of different couples working with “mistress dispellers” to finally zero in on the people she features in her film. At first all were told this was a film about modern love in China and when the truth was finally revealed, after filming was completed, they were shown the scenes shot and agreed to being featured in the film. The result is a spellbinding view into modern China, and modern love.

Another documentary which I loved watching in Venice is One to One: John & Yoko by award winning director Kevin Macdonald, which he made with Sam Rice-Edwards. With a focus on the musical couple’s 1972 One to One charity concert in Madison Square Garden, the film takes us on a ride through John and Yoko’s early life in America, sharing a small apartment in NYC’s Greenwich Village and watching endless hours of television, but also navigating the perils of US politics during those challenging times.

When I asked Macdonald (whose previous work has included the fabulous High & Low - John Galliano documentary and the Academy Awards, BAFTA and Golden Globes winning film The Last King of Scotland) what he learned from making this film, he candidly admitted: “I learned that the early 1970's are uncannily similar to the mid 2020's. There is a rhyming: Environmental issues; populist politics; race; anti-war protests…” continuing that “quite honestly it became quite spooky when Kamala Harris secured the nomination and Trump was shot. In our film you see the attempted assignation of populist and racist politician
George Wallace and the presidential run of Shirley Chisholm.”

During the press and industry screening of the documentary, the fire alarm of the Casino building on the Lido went off halfway through the film, as if Nixon — who is strongly maligned in the film, though Lennon’s words — was listening in, and disapproving of his portrayal. It was eerie but then the show went on. The third doc features a fierce woman, behind the camera, and a couple of cool male filmmakers interviewed. It is I Will Revenge This World with Love — S. Paradjanov, directed by Zara Jian. The film focuses on the bigger than life figure of filmmaker and artist Sergei Paradjanov, an ethnic Armenian born in Soviet controlled Georgia. Paradjanov’s masterpieces of the Seventh Art include his 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates, and Ashik Kerib released in 1988, which he co-directed with Dodo Abashidze. Critics and filmmakers alike agree that Paradjanov is one of the greatest filmmakers who ever existed and his fans include Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni who is quoted as saying that the director’s work “strikes with its perfection of beauty,” but also Francis Ford Coppola. With Coppola’s latest work Megalopolis releasing later this month, it could be important to revisit the Armenian director’s work to fully understand our American legend’s path and intent. The way the extraordinary Jian tells Paradjanov’s story also offers a cautionary tale about putting artists in geographical boxes, as simply classifying him as a “Soviet filmmaker” would be downright wrong. The film features interviews with filmmakers Emir Kusturica, Tarsem and Atom Egoyan — all of whom admit they have been deeply inspired by Paradjanov’s work.

Last but not least, a stay in Venice just wouldn’t be the same without a visit to the Art Biennale and if you can manage to secure an invitation to a special gala held on the grounds of an ancient Venetian palazzo, well then, all is right with the world. Held in the courtyard of the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, on San Marco, this year’s gala held by the Doha Film Institute included invitees from the world of Arab cinema, which the DFI supported in Venice, but also international filmmakers like jury member Giuseppe Tornatore, as well as Silver Lion winner Brady Corbet, who, a few days later, collected his award for Best Direction for the buzzy historical drama The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody.

The gala, co-hosted by Media City Qatar, celebrated the exhibition organized this year by the DFI, held within the historical Palazzo Franchetti, which is titled ‘Your Ghosts Are Mine – Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices’. It explores themes of memory and identity through over 40 films and installations by creatives from the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. It includes selected films supported, co-financed or initiated by the DFI and video works produced by Qatar Museums, co-organized by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the future Art Mill Museum. And while Angelina Jolie might not have had time to participate in junkets and one on one interviews with journalists while on the Lido, she did make time to attend the exhibition, wearing an elegant brown Saint Laurent dress and her usual class.

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