NON-FICTION AT VENICE BIENNALE/1

Aleksandr Kiselev
Sep 20, 2023
3 min read

Documentaries are always important part of Venice cinema biennale. The documentaries of different ganres, but all of them face the complexity of the Universe.

HOLLYWOODGATE

by Ibrahim Nash’at.

The director's notes:

«…As a child, I was exposed to many who saw the Taliban as heroes. In my adolescence I questioned this belief, and it led me to journalism. Since then, I have worked across the Middle East and Europe filming world leaders. Most of these people were men who merely wanted me to be a spokesperson for their perspective and an amplifier of their message. When the Taliban came to power (again), I was stunned. What would happen to the people of Afghanistan? It haunted me. Because of my background and professional experiences, I wondered if I could gain access to the Taliban. If so, this time I would show the world what they wanted me to see and, more importantly, what I saw.»

The day after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban immediately move to occupy the Hollywood Gate complex, claimed to be a former CIA base in Kabul. The Taliban find what the most technologically advanced military in history left behind: aircrafts, weapons, and valuable military equipment. Baffled by the technology, Malawi Mansour, the newly assigned Air Force commander, orders his soldiers to inventory and repair everything they can. Mukhtar, motivated to one day conquer the world, arrives at Hollywood Gate aiming to build a high-ranking military career.

While Malawi Mansour and Mukhtar are focused on maximizing their own personal objectives, their comrades continue to repair the weapons left behind at Hollywood Gate. AK-47s that were once used by the US and NATO are now in the hands of the Taliban; helicopters and fighter jets that were thought to be destroyed now lethally bomb the opposition, creating untold collateral damage in the process; and the use of international documentarians for the purposes of propaganda is now underway. Over the course of one year, the film exposes the transformation of a fundamentalist militia into a military regime.

FRENTE A GUERNICA (DIRECTOR’S CUT)

by Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi

The director’s notes:

“…It was terrible working on the war while another war is being waged. It took from the end of 2019 to 2023 to make the film Frente a Guernica (Versione integrale), shot from the film archives with our analytical camera. Nine hours of private and public materials. A German UFA documentary records the effects of the raids on the town of Guernica carried out on April 26, 1937, by the Nazi and Italian fascist air forces, which dropped their bombs on the population. On April 28, 1937, Pablo Picasso received a letter from the Spanish Republican government of a work for the World’s Fair in Paris. Our is a film against the nuclear madness that Picasso had foreseen with Guernica.»

The idea for the film arose from the visit to the Museo Reina Sofía on the occasion of the screening of Pays Barbare in 2014. The sensations on seeing Picasso’s Guernica, after the work’s return from exile, prompted us to look through the materials on Spain in our possession and described in our notebooks. There wasn't Robert Flaherty’s 35mm film, which was at the MoMA in New York, where Guernica had spent a long time. The film was given the Museo Reina Sofía. In the film Frente a Guernica (Versione integrale), while Lucrezia Lerro, one of the two narrators, talks about the “case” of Osip Mandelstam (…the diary of Mikhail Koltsov on the arrival of the writers for the congress, as well as all the other captions of Frente a Guernica (Versione integrale).