Three years have passed since my first and only visit to ‘Biennale Cinema’ – Venice’s film festival – and this year I finally managed to head back there. Back in may, after I realised that I would have had only a few summer vacation days since I used most of them to go to Japan in Easter, I decided to plan two brief long-weekend trips in August: one in Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival to attend a friend’s play, and another in Venice. I thorougly planned the the movie schedule I would have tried to stick to during my four days in the sultry september weather that plagues the festival every year, in order to get inside the dark venues where movies were screened all day long.
Due to the excitement for the movie trip, I decided to bring along one of the cameras that always gave me the most inconsistent results: the Mint RF70. For how much I love its manual settings and wider lens, the lightmeter often gives wrong readings and the flash sync sometimes stops working – all issues that are usually solved by removing/re-inserting the AA batteries and thus resetting the camera. Moreover the focus scale and the actual rangefinder focus are not coherent, making one doubt one or the other (the rangefinder usually is right). Still in Milan I tested the camera and the results were good. Therefore I decided that I just had to be more methodical and slow when using this camera, and everything would be solved.
Luckily I was right: other than one picture that was overexposed because it was midday and I had not brought the ND filters with me that once, and a picture out of focus because it was at mid-distance and I wanted to try zone focusing instead of using the rangefinder, the pictures were always good. The wider aspect ratio of the Instax Wide pictures kind of has a cinematic feel to it, and the colours are very bright.
The festival takes place in Lido di Venezia, right outside Venice’s main island, and one has to take the ferry to get there. I woke up at 6:30AM – or earlier, as I woke up at 4:30AM on the first day to catch the train from Milan – in order to get on the very crowded 7:15AM ferry and be there by 7:40. To that very harsh early rise it corresponded a much rewarding day watching one movie after another. In four days I watched nice movies, six of which in the PalaBiennale – a very large venue slightly away from all the others, where movies from the day before’s premiere were available to those with industry/press passes. Out of those nice movies, I would suggest three of them: SOLE by Carlo Sironi [ITA review], QIQIU by Pema Tseden and EMA by Pablo Larrain [ITA review]. All three of them left me with a sense bemusement and wonder, both for the experimental attempts in either the cinematography or story-telling, or the lack of fear of breaking the rules.
Other than being locked in a dark room with strangers, I also spent a lot of time with friends, and the evening was reserved to social activities, and we indeed had great aperitifs and dinners in many places across the town. On the last day we also went to visit a photo exhibition diplaying 20×24 Polaroid portraits of festival attendees shot between 1996 and 2004, and I did not expect how much the sheer inventiveness of such simply conceived pictures would have fascinated me. I have to shoot more portraits: I have been working on a big portrait project for the last few years, and only now making the finals steps to maybe make an exhibition out of it – yet during these editing phase of that project I stopped taking portraits and, although I already have in mind my next project in this area of photography, I really need to start taking more of them. And I need to be inventive, I need to experiment as much as I can.
While there I also managed to catch glimpses of cinema-related VIPs, and indulged in the act snapshot taking. From left to right: Paolo Mereghetti, Zerocalcare, Walter Veltroni and Claire Denis.
Thanks to Giuditta Fullone for reviewing this article.
All the images included in this article were shot on Fujifilm instant film, and then scanned. The cover drawing is made by me.