Italian director Michele Placido offered a personal take on the 1968 anti-war movement in Italy in his autobiographical Il Grande Sogno (The Great Dream) at the Venice film festival. This is a diary, a kind of popular novel, a political novel, even if I may seem to be saying something at the end, said Placido, 63, formerly a young police officer who crossed the barricades to join the student movement. Mario Capanna, the movement s charismatic leader, praised Il Grande Sogno at Wednesday s news conference, saying: I found the film to be crystal clear.... Recalling these years in an autobiographical key invites one to dream today and tomorrow. Capanna, now 64, added: Those who control our past control our future, therefore it s important to revisit the past. Culturally, 1968 has won. The film - the third Italian work vying for the Golden Lion here - centers on a romance between bourgeois revolutionary, Laura (Jasmine Trinca), and a policeman, Nicola (Riccardo Scamarcio), who wants to become an actor. Also Wednesday, Iranian photographer and visual artist Shirin Neshat made her directorial debut with Women Without Men, dissecting Iranian society at the time of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that overturned the nationalist government of Mohamed Mossadegh and installed the shah in power. Against that backdrop, four women - a prostitute, an activist, a cosmopolitan woman and a traditional young girl - fight for individual freedom and independence, winding up together at an idyllic orchard in the countryside. The four characters are who I am - every one of them carries some personal dilemma, though it is not exactly autobiographical, Neshat said. Based on a novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, the film is dedicated to those who lost their lives fighting for freedom and democracy in Iran, from the constitutional revolution of 1906 to the Green Movement of 2009. Neshat said Wednesday: This film speaks to the Iranian people and the world. We have been struggling for over 100 years, and we will not give up. ... We will get there one day. She added: Dictators have changed in form and shape and ideology, but it still goes on. Both Neshat and Parsipur, who spent nearly five years in prison in Iran, live in the United States. Also Wednesday, zombies invaded the 66th Mostra in horror guru George A. Romero s Survival of the Dead, pitting two clans against each other on an island off Delaware, on the east coast of the United States. For the O Flynns, the only way to bring an end to the scourge is to blow up the zombie s head with whatever weapon comes to hand - pistol, machine gun, grenade, hatchet... The Muldoons would rather allow the zombies to keep coming back until a vaccine can be developed.
