Peak cinema: ‘Everest’ kicks off Venice Film Festival

Also due to be shown for the first time on Wednesday was streaming giant Netflix’s debut foray into feature films, “Beasts of No Nations“.

2015’s Venice Film Festival opens with “Everest” a 3D biographical disaster thriller-adventure that accounts the dramatic events that occurred during the 1996 summit on Mount Everest.

Everest tells the story of one of the deadliest accidents on the world’s highest mountain, when eight climbers lost their lives during a blizzard in 1996.

Baltasar calls the film his “largest and most hard project” ever.

It is bewildering to observe how the promotion of the film seems to lure masses into believing Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightly have leading preponderant roles when in actuality they are marginal players of a choral narrative.

Festival director Alberto Barbera said the opening film had to strike a balance between artistry and audience-pleasing.

Given that such poignant details of the tragedy were widely publicized at the time, the challenge for Kormakur was to retain viewers’ attention despite majority knowing how the story ends.

“It’s not as big as the Toronto Film Festival, and it doesn’t have the sort of aura of Cannes or Berlin, which are just massive”.

Shot in 3-D and on the super-sized IMAX format, the film is a nerve-shredding, life-or-death battle between the mountain and the wind-whipped, snow-blinded, oxygen-deprived climbers.

The Carkey Fukunaga-directed drama about child soldiers in Africa is among 21 works competing for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion.

A cool dude, fun-loving and a poster boy for big Himalayan mountain climbing, Gyllenhaal’s Fischer is first met sunbathing at base camp, with seemingly not a care in the world.

That has not gone down well with major cinema chains in the United States and elsewhere who have point blank refused to distribute the film, arguing that to do so without any period where it is only available in their theatres would be suicidal. “I’d like that same hospitality to one day be extended here to all immigrants”, Cuaron said.

Out of competition, the festival will host the premiere of “Black Mass”, with Johnny Depp portraying the Irish-American gangster Whitey Bulger, and “Spotlight”, starring Michael Keaton as an editor involved in the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation of pedophile priests serving in the Roman Catholic church in Boston.