‘Nonostante,’ ‘September 5’ to Open Venice Horizons Sidebar

The 81st Venice International Film Festival has announced the opening night films for its Horizons and Horizons Extra competition sections.

Nonostante, the second feature from Italian director Valerio Mastandrea (2018’s Ride) will open the Horizons competition section on August 28. The Horizons Extra competition section will kick off on August 29 with September 5, Tim Fehlbaum’s historical drama about the 1972 Munich Olympics starring Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro and Ben Chaplin.

September 5 focuses on a sports broadcasting team who suddenly find themselves covering a hostage crisis when the Palestinian militant organization Black September infiltrates the Olympic Village, kills two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and takes the other nine hostage. The Teacher’s Lounge breakout Leonie Benesch also co-stars. Fehlbaum is best known for his sci-fi features Hell (2011) and The Colony (2021).

September 5 was produced by BerghausWöbke Filmproduktion and Projected Picture Works, in co-production with Constantin Film and ERF Edgar Reitz Filmproduktion. Fehlbaum, Philipp Trauer, Thomas Wöbke, Sean Penn, John Ira Palmer, and John Wildermuth produced. Republic Pictures holds the rights to the film outside German-speaking Europe and is selling the movie worldwide.

Nonostante features Perfect Strangers star Valerio Mastandrea as a man hospitalized with a long-term illness, content to be shut away from the world, who finds his comfortable routine disrupted by an angry new patient (Truman actress Dolores Fonzi) who refuses to accept her condition. Lino Musella, Giorgio Montanini, Justin Alexandre Korovkin, Barbara Ronchi and Luca Lionello co-star. Viola Prestieri and Valeria Golino produced Nonostante for HT Film, alongside Francesco Tatò and Oscar Glioti for Damocle, and Moreno Zani and Malcom Pagani for Tenderstories with Rai Cinema. BiM Distribuzione will release the movie in Italy.

“Opening the festival means opening the film to the eyes and hearts of the public,” said Mastandrea. “I take it as an opportunity to release a story that has been mine alone for a long time and which, I hope, will become everyone’s.”

Separately, Venice has also unveiled this year’s poster (see below). Designed by renowned Italian illustrator and artist Lorenzo Mattotti, who has been behind the last seven Venice posters, the colorful image features a woman in a bright red cloak riding an elephant in the city’s legendary lagoon.

Mattotti says the image, inspired by a memorable event from the 1981 Venice Carnival when an actual elephant wandered through Venice’s narrow streets, symbolizes the festival’s role as a crossroads of global cinema, with the elephant representing ‘Memory and also the History of Cinema: a party, a parade, a show!’”

The 81st Venice Film Festival will announce its full competition lineup on Tuesday, July 23. The 2024 festival runs from August 28 to Sept. 7.