Friday, August 31, 2018

#Venezia75 – La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival - Roma - Alfonso Cuaron


photograph - Netflix– courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

#Venezia75 – La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival
Roma - Alfonso Cuaron

Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, with Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Daniela Demesa, Carlos Peralta, and Nancy García is his most personal project to date. Director, writer and cinematographer Alfonso Cuaron, chronicles a turbulent year in the lives of a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City. Cuaron, inspired by the women from his childhood, delivers an artful ode to the matriarchy that shaped his world. It is a vivid portrayal of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil, in a country facing confrontation between a government-backed militia and student demonstrators. Filmed in luminous black and whiteRoma is an intimate, gut-wrenching and ultimately life-affirming portrait of the ways, small and large, one family maintains its balance in a time of personal, social and political strife.

photograph Carlos Somonte - Netflix– courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

“There are periods in history that scar societies and moments in life that transform us as individuals. Time and space constrain us, but they also define who we are, creating inexplicable bonds with others that flow with us at the same time and through the same places. ROMA is an attempt to capture the memory of events that I experienced almost fifty years ago. It is an exploration of Mexico’s social hierarchy, where class and ethnicity have been perversely interwoven to this date and, above all, it’s an intimate portrait of the women who raised me in a recognition of love as a mystery that transcends space, memory and time.”
Alfonso Cuaron
Director’s Statement

Alfonso Cuaron and Yalitza Aparicio

Contessanally – Don’t miss this beautiful film of ordinary and extraordinary domestic life – wonderful Yalitza Aparicio who had no acting experience before this film - 8/10
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#Venezia – #BiennaleCinema2018 – Orizzonti - Sulla Mia Pelle – Alessio Cremonini

  photograph courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

 Orizzonti
Sulla Mia Pelle – Alessio Cremonini

Alessio Cremonini’s Sulla Mia Pelle – On My Skin – tells the incredible true story behind the most controversial Italian court cases in recent years. Stefano Cucchi, brilliantly played by Alessandro Borghi, was arrested for a minor crime and mysteriously found dead during his detention. In one week's time, a family is changed forever.

  photograph courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
 
“Sulla Mia Pelle, among various other things, is a way of combating, of opposing the greatest of injustices: silence. Of all the words that have been spent on his case over the years these are, for me, the most illuminating: “It is not acceptable, from a social and civil point of view even more than from a legal one, for a person to die, and not from natural causes, while in the care and responsibility of organs of the state”
Alessio Cremonini
 
Contessanally – tells the tragic true story of Stefano Cucchi beaten up whilst detained by carabinieri – brilliantly portrayed by Alessandro Borghi – weak acting by supporting cast – 7/10




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Thursday, August 30, 2018

#Venezia75 – La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival –Opening Ceremony Red Carpet – First Man


  photograph by ASAC -  copyright and courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Red Carpet – Opening Ceremony
#Venezia75 – La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival
World Premier - First Man – Damien Chazelle

First Man directed by Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) and starring Ryan Gosling, Jason Clarke and Claire Foy, produced by Universal Pictures, was the opening film, in Competition, of the 75th Venice Film Festival (29 August - 8 September 2018) directed by Alberto Barbera and organized by the Venice Biennale chaired by Paolo Baratta. The film's world premiere marks the eve of the 49th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
Above. Jason Clarke, Olivia Hamilton, Damien Chazelle, Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy.

photograph by ASAC -  copyright and courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
 
"I am honored by the invitation from Venice and I am excited to come back. It is particularly exciting that this news is so close to the anniversary of the moon landing. I cannot wait to bring the film to the show ".
director Damien Chazelle

Olivia Hamilton and Damien Chazelle


  photograph by ASAC -  copyright and courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
  
Paolo Baratta
President  - La biennale di Venezia


photograph by ASAC -  copyright and courtesy La Biennale di Venezia 

Ryan Gosling




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#Venezia75 – #BiennaleCinema2018 - First Man – Damien Chazelle

  photograph -  copyright NBC Universal – courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

 

#Venezia75 – La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival 
World Premier - Opening Film
First Man – Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle’s film First Man with Ryan Gosling, Jason Clarke, Claire Foy, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Ciaran Hinds, Christopher Abbott, Patrick Fugit, Lukas Haas is the riveting story of NASA’s mission to land a man on the moon, focusing on Neil Armstrong and the years 1961-1969. A visceral, first-person account, based on the book by James R. Hansen, the movie explores the sacrifices and the cost – on Armstrong and on the nation – of one of the most dangerous missions in history.

photograph -  copyright NBC Universal – courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

“I wanted to understand what compelled these men to voyage into deep space, and what the experience – moment by moment, breath by breath – might have felt like.”
Damien Chazelle

 



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Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Venice – Isola di San Giorgio: Architecture Biennale - Pavilion of the Holy See

 
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore
16th International Architecture National Pavilions Biennale
Pavilion of the Holy See – Vatican Chapels

Commissioner: Cardinale Gianfranco Ravasi
Curators: Francesco Dal Co, Micol Forti
Exhibitors: Andrew Berman, Francesco Cellini, Javier Corvalàn, Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores, Norman Foster, Teronobu Fujimori, Sean Godsell, Carla Juacaba, Smiljan Radic, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Francesco Magnani and Traudy Pelzel
The pavilion of the Holy See at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, until November 25, is based on a precise model; the “woodland chapel” built in 1920 by the architect Gunnar Asplund in the Cemetery of Stockholm. To help visitors understand this choice, an exhibit space has been set up at the entrance of the pavilion of the Holy See, displaying the drawings and model of Asplund’s chapel. This theme has been proposed to the ten architects invited to build ten chapels, gathered in the wooded area in the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, to form the pavilion of the Holy See, named Vatican Chapels. The request addressed to the architects implies an unusual challenge, since the designers had been asked to come to terms with a building that will be isolated and inserted in an utterly abstract natural setting, characterized by its openness to the water of the lagoon. In the forest where the “Asplund Pavilion” and the chapels have been located there are no destinations, and the environment is simply a metaphor of the wandering of life.

Asplund Pavilion
Francesco Magnani and Traudy Pelzel
with
Alpi

 
Asplund Pavilion
Gunnar Asplund - Woodland Chapel - 1920
model and drawings
Stockholm cemetery

 

 A Precise Form of Anonymous Origin
Andrew Berman – USA
with
Moretti - Terna

Entirely covered in transparent polycarbonate, the structure
is a precise shape of anonymous origin, an indefinite presence in
a natural landscape. It offers a basic level of shelter and protection, and is built with readily available material.




Andrew Berman

 
Not a Project; a Reflection
Francesco Cellini – Italy
with
Panariagroup

Not a chapel, but a reflection on chapels.
The layout of the garden around it allows the removal of part of the casing from the structure, relying on the surrounding environment for a sense of interior. Space and material are elemental, dry, almost abstract.





A Nomadic Chapel
Javier Corvalan – Paraguay
with
Simeon

A twenty-meter-large cylinder balanced on a support, which happens to be a bricola, one of those poles that mark the waterways in the Venetian Lagoon. All tensions resolve into an embrace in the shape of three-dimensional cross between the circular space and the forest that surrounds it.

 
The Morning Chapel
Ricardo Flores, Eva Prats – Spain
with
Saint-Gobain Italia

Derived from drawings by Ivan Leonidov, one
 of Russia greatest constructivist architects, the chapel is carved out of a partition wall opened on one side. An uninterrupted, compact surface, midway between
a forgotten fragment of an existing building and an open-air chapel.


 
Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores

 
Crosses Morphed into a Tensegrity Structure
Norman Foster – UK
with
Tecno – Terna - Maeg

Following the practice of Buckminster Fuller, Foster created a tensile structure or a tensegrity structure based on cross-shaped elements and built with a complex construction of cables and struts. Tensive elements dominate compressive ones. 

 
 Cross Chapel
Terunobu Fujimori – Japan
with
Ligno Alp – Barth Interni

Inspired by an existing church in Japan from around 1719. It has been built with the Shou Sugi Ban Japanese technique, an old method for improving the durability of cedar tree planks by burning their surface. 

 


 A Dynamic Entity Capable of Surviving Thousands of Kilometers Away
Sean Godsell – Australia
with
Maeg - Zinteck 

This chapel has no roots, so it can be moved anywhere in the world. It is 11 meters tall and has a square base 2.5 meters wide. Its galvanized iron structure stretches up while leaving the altar clear. 

 
A Bench and a Cross
Carla Juaçaba – Brazil
with
Secco Sistemi

A cross and a bench. Four stainless steel beams (8 meters long and 12 centimeters large) mirror what is around them on their polished surface. At given moments in the day, they almost disappear from sight. A chapel en plein air.

 
A Chapel as a Roadside Shrine
Smiljan Radic - Chile
with
Moretti – Saint-Gobain Italia

 A small, tapering cylinder (6 meters) with thin reinforced concrete walls and an open roof. The outer surface is rough, while the inside has been decorated by printing bubble wrap on the cement. The chapel is situated on the side of the road.

 
No, It is Not…
Eduardo Souto de Moura – Portugal
with
Laboratorio Morseletto

Pietra di Vicenza stone blocks, of 40 centimeters by 2.60 meters, enclose the tiny building, inspired by the memory of a journey to Machu Picchu the architect took with close friends Álvaro Siza and Fernado Tavora. 

 
many thanks for captions – courtesy
The BAG-Biennale Architettura Guide
www.venezianews.it
 
 

















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