Venice Film Festival 2007 - The British Have Arrived
September 1st, 2007 by Andre Soares
Peter Greeenaway directs Nightwatching.
Arifa Akbar in The [London] Independent:
"This time the British are not just coming, they may even have arrived. A quarter of a decade after screenwriter Colin Welland issued his warning as he collected his 1982 Oscar for Chariots of Fire, there is all the evidence to suggest that a golden age of British film-making has arrived.
"With four homegrown movies in the running for the Venice Film Festival’s coveted Golden Lion award, announced next Sunday, the festival’s director, Marco Mueller, said it was one of the finest epochs for British films."
Things change rather rapidly nowadays. Polar ice caps are disappearing at a much faster rate than previously thought, while whole national film industries go from moribund to alive and kicking in a matter of a few months. Just think that last May Stephen Frears was sounding the death bells for British cinema, which was all but excluded from the Palme d’Or competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
But then enters Marco Mueller, who has acted as president of the Venice festival for the past four years, and who long ago decided that for his festival to compete with Cannes it had to become more "international," i.e., it had to give emphasis to English-language films that would appeal to the U.S. market.
"The fact that many films from Venice go on to be nominated for Oscars can’t be a coincidence," Mueller told The Independent. "And it means the Oscars are now accepting films which are original and innovative, such as Frears’ The Queen."
Actually, The Queen is neither original nor innovative — and that is exactly why it was recognized by the Academy — but festival presidents must be good at this sort of b.s. Some may even believe their own nonsense.
In any case, as per The Independent article, films launched in Venice over the past three years have gone on to receive 51 Oscar nominations. That’s a lot of Academy-friendly originality and innovativeness.
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