The Venice Glass Week – Bauer Hotel: Vanitas – Lilla Tabasso

Vanitas

Lilla Tabasso

On the occasion of the first edition of The Venice Glass Week, involving over one hundred events dedicated to the art of glass, with a particular focus on that of Murano.   Vanitas, is a solo exhibition by Lilla Tabasso, born between the collaboration of the Caterina Tognon Art Gallery and Francesca Bortolotto Possati, CEO, of the Bauer Hotel, which is on show until September 17, in the hotel lobby.

http://www.caterinatognon.com/

http://www.bauervenezia.com/en/

http://lillatabasso.com/

http://www.theveniceglassweek.com/tvgw/?lang=en

“Capture the beauty of the nature, unique for its mix between the perfection and imperfection.”

Lilla Tabasso

Lilla Tabasso is a biologist, designer and artisan. Following her studies at the Faculty of Biology at Milan University, she began working with Murano glass using the ancient techniques of blowing and modeling at the flame.   Her artistic research is focused on Botany.  Her works are vases of flowers of incredible realism that draw from nature an infinite palette of colors, limpid shades and also – fundamentally for the artist – mutations and imperfections: dry branches, faded flowers and wilting leaves. These are some features that can be seen in Vanitas, a work that lends its title to this exhibition. 

   

Lilla Tabasso

Giacinto – unique work – 2017 – Ramo di Melo  - Unique work – 2016
Flamed Murano Glass – hand-blown and modeled

Vanitas - Lilla Tabasso

 

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#Venezia74 - Awards 74th Film Festival - La Biennale di Venezia - Cinema

Photograph by ASAC courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Official Awards

74^th Film Festival

La Biennale di Venezia - Cinema

GOLDEN LION – Best Film

THE SHAPE OF WATER by Guillermo del Toro (USA)

Guillermo del Toro with Paolo Baratta

Photograph by ASAC courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

 

#Venezia74 – The Jury

The Venezia 74 Jury, was chaired by Annette Bening, and comprised of Ildiko Enyedi, Michel Franco, Rebecca Hall, Anna Mouglalis, David Stratton, Jasmine Trinca, Edgar Wright and Yonfan having viewed all 21 films in competition.  

http://www.labiennale.org/en/news/official-awards-74th-venice-film-festival

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#Venezia74 – Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno – Abdellatif Kechiche

photograph - courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno 

Abdellatif Kechiche

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno with Shain Boumedine, Ophelie Bau, Salim Kechiouche, Lou Luttiau, Alexia Chardard, Hafsia Herzi, Kamel Saadi, Estefania Argelich is from the novel La blessure la vraie by Francois Begaudeau. Amin, an aspiring screenwriter living in Paris, returns home for the summer, to a fishing village in the South of France. It is a time of reconnecting with his family and his childhood friends. Together with his cousin Tony and his best friend Ophelie, he spends his time between the Tunisian restaurant run by his parents, the local bars and the beaches frequented by girls on holiday. Enchanted by the many female characters who surround him, Amin remains in awe of these summer sirens while his Dionysian cousin throws himself into their carnal delights with euphoria. Armed with his camera and guided by the bright summer light of the Mediterranean coast, Amin pursues his philosophical quest while gathering inspiration for his screenplays. When it comes to love, only destiny, only Mektoub can decide. This coming-of-age saga set in 1994 casts a nostalgic glow on the wonders of youth.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2017

photograph - courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

 Abdellatif Kechiche

Director

Contessanally – this fast paced three hour long movie is about teenage love in the South of France during the summer vacations and celebrates life – 8/10.

 

#Venezia 74 – Palazzo del Cinema

Red Carpet

8am  - Rai TV ready to go live

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#Venezia74 – Out of Competition – Happy Winter - Giovanni Totaro

  photograph - courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Happy Winter

Giovanni Totaro

In Giovanni Totaro’s Happy Winter, every summer on Mondello Beach in Palermo, more than a thousand cabins are erected to house the same number of groups of bathers who will spend the season in them. For these people the “huts” are the perfect setting in which to hide behind the memory of a social status that the crisis of recent years has undermined. A family gets into debt to go on a seaside vacation and to look well-off among the bathers, three women sunbathe in order to feel as if they are still young and to become the stars of the summer, while on the same beach a barman thinks about earning as much money as possible to get through the winter. Everyone is waiting for the night of August 15 to play a leading role in the summer Vanity Fair and to keep on pretending that the economic crisis doesn’t exist.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2017

“The possession of a seaside bathing hut represents an illusion of affluence distant from everyday life, which is slowly stripping the middle class of the gains it has made. Happy Winter sets out to convey this sense of community with its natural contradictions, stemming from a holiday with condominial, at times tribal aspects, remote from the clichés of a vacation by the sea. In this summer holiday village seen as a metaphor for Italy, the economic worries tackled under the beach umbrella find a response in the cultural crisis of Italians. In the film the enjoyable and carefree aspect of the beach is tainted by a bitterness that is always present in the stories, a sort of unpaid bill that connects the protagonists with their return to “normality”. This microcosm enclosed in a glass bead has a precise end: on September 15 the bathers empty their huts, wishing each other a Happy Winter.”

Giovanni Totaro

Director

 Contessanally – Kitschy hyperrealism of life on the beach in Sicily – 7/10

#Venezia 74 – Palazzo del Cinema

Sala Grande

 

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#Venezia74 – Ammore e Malavita – Manetti Bros.

photograph - courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Ammore e Malavita

Manetti Bros.

The Manetti Brother’s Ammore e Malavita with Giampaolo Morelli, Serena Rossi, Claudia Gerini, Carlo Buccirosso is based in Naples. Ciro is a feared killer. Along with Rosario, he is one of the two “tigers” at the service of Don Vincenzo, “’o re d’o pesce” [the king of fish], and his astute wife, Donna Maria. Fatima is a dreamer, a young nurse. Two worlds that are apparently distant but fated to collide.
One night Fatima finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ciro is given the job of getting rid of the girl who has seen too much. But things don’t go as planned. The two end up face to face, recognize each other and rediscover, one in the other, the never forgotten love of their adolescence.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2017

 photograph - courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

“If a killer working for the camorra is told to bump off a woman and recognizes in her the love of his adolescence, are we talking about love or the world of crime? This is where we started out and the story came afterward, almost by itself. Songs accompany the fundamental and most emotionally powerful moments of the story: they are sung when two characters are about to kiss, but during a shootout too. The genre of the musical has allowed us to go over the top, tackling profound and important themes like love and death while maintaining a light and spectacular tone. We are not aiming for realism, but plausibility. In order to believe in the story we are telling we like to take real characters, whom we have met in real life, and set them in the fanciful frame of an exaggerated tale. The city of Naples has been our inspiration and the result is a personal revisiting of its most charged and popular art form, the sceneggiata or Neapolitan melodrama. But let’s be clear, the message of the film is not: “This is what happens in Naples.” What happens, happens only in our story.
Our Naples is not just the gloomy and despairing city as it has lately been portrayed in the movies or on TV, but also a Naples that, in spite of all its problems, stimulates with its cultural ferment and inspires with its sense of humanity. Every time we go back it inevitably makes us smile. Whatever our mood. An incomparable power.”

Antonio and Marco Manetti

Directors

Contessanally –  most enjoyable Neapolitan Musicale thriller/comedy – treating themes like love and death – 8/10

#Venezia 74 – Palazzo del Cinema

Sala Grande

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#Venezia74 – My Generation - David Batty

  photograph by Jeff Spicer – Raymi Hero Productions 2017 – courtesy La Biennale di venezia

My Generation 

David Batty

Narrator - Michael Caine

As themselves: David Bailey, Joan Collins, Roger Daltrey, Donovan, Dudley Edwards, Marianne Faithfull, Barbara Hulanicki, Lulu, Paul McCartney, Terry O’Neill, David Puttnam, Mary Quant, Mim Scala, Sandie Shaw, Penelope Tree, Twiggy.

British film icon Michael Caine narrates and stars in My Generation, the vivid and inspiring story of his personal journey through 1960s London. Based on personal accounts and stunning archive footage, this feature-length documentary film sees Caine travel back in time to talk to The Beatles, Twiggy, David Bailey, Mary Quant, The Rolling Stones, David Hockney and other star names. The film has been painstakingly assembled over the last six years to tell the story of the birth of pop culture in London, through the eyes of the young Michael Caine: “For the first time in history the young working class stood up for ourselves and said: We’re here, this is our society and we’re not going away!” My Generation uses carefully intercut audio of Caine’s conversations with his co-stars blended with unseen archive material to take the movie viewer back to the heart of the 1960s. In one poignant sequence we accompany Caine as he drives through Piccadilly Circus today overlaid with original 60s film to create a remarkable time travel effect.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2017

 

David Batty, Michael and Shakira Caine

“We are here, this is our society and we are not going away” defines the life of my working class hero, Michael Caine. It’s why I owe such a debt to him and the ‘60s. We all do. It’s not just the songs, the films, the design, the photography, it’s also the freedom to challenge elitist hypocrisy, the opportunity to create your own moral code, the inspiration to be whoever you want whatever your background. Thanks to him and his likes, both my parents broke their working class shackles and gave me a better life. So this film is about that ‘60s revolution in London that still reverberates today. By the generation that changed the world forever. How Michael and his friends led the charge against the dead hand of Britain’s class-ridden establishment and in so doing created a new pop culture, defined the essence of cool and threw the greatest party the world has ever seen. He was there. We all are.”

David Batty

Director

Contessnally – Loved - My generation is My Generation London of the 1960s – 8/10

#Venezia 74 – Palazzo del Cinema

1pm – Jennifer Lawrence fans waiting for the 7.30pm screening of

Darren Aronofsky - Mother

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#Venezia74 – Ex Libris – The New York Public Library – Frederick Wiseman

Photograph Zipporah Films – Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia Cinema

Ex Libris – The New York Public Library

Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman’s film, Ex Libris – The New York Public Library, goes behind the scenes of one of the greatest knowledge institutions of the world. The film reveals the library as a place of welcome, cultural exchange and learning to 18 million patrons and 32 million online visitors annually. There are 92 library branches throughout Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island. The NYPL is committed to being a resource for all the inhabitants of this multifaceted and cosmopolitan city. It is accessible, open to everyone and exemplifies the deeply rooted American belief in the individual’s right to know and be informed. The library is one of the most democratic institutions in America—all races, social classes and ethnicities are welcome and are active participants in the life and work of the library. The library strives to inspire learning, advance knowledge and strengthens communities.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2017

 

“Public libraries in America have changed since I was young. I remember going to the library to get books. Libraries now offer so much more. During the shooting of the film I was surprised to discover the vast variety of services, opportunities and experiences libraries provide to anyone who walks through the door. Libraries of today have become community centers with after school programs for kids and adult education courses in languages, citizenship, business and computer programming. Regardless of the current American political scene, the library remains an ideal of inclusion, democracy and freedom of expression.”

Frederick Wiseman

Director

Contessanally - this wonderful documentary tells the story of the iconic institution  -  8/10

 

#Venezia74 - Palazzo del Cinema

 standing ovation for director Frederick Wiseman

Paolo Baratta President La Biennale di Venezia

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