VENICE, Sept 1 \u2014 A new documentary about British singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull urges viewers to take a fresh look at the extraordinary life of the \u201cSwinging 60s\u201d icon who died in January this year.<\/p>\n
Broken English is an out-of-competition entry in the prestigious festival from British directing duo Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth, which casts the singer-songwriter\u2019s legacy and reputation in a new light.<\/p>\n
After being discovered in 1964, Faithfull shot to fame with the hit As Tears Go By, written by her former boyfriend, Mick Jagger, and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.<\/p>\n
Broken English includes archival footage and conversations with Faithfull\u2014who died at age 78 during production\u2014but the film\u2019s unique format means it mixes fiction and multiple genres.<\/p>\n
It features a fictional Ministry of Not Forgetting\u2014whose director is played by Tilda Swinton\u2014charged with rectifying the historical memory of Faithfull, whose outspokenness and no-holds-barred lifestyle fuelled a backlash from the British press.<\/p>\n
Her relationship with Jagger ended up overshadowing her own career, while sudden fame and fortune brought on drug addiction and eventually homelessness.<\/p>\n
Her 1979 album Broken English breathed new life into her career, and she worked relentlessly, collaborating with a stream of younger artists keen to work with her.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u2018Rightfully wary\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
In seeking to set the story straight on her life, the real-life Faithfull is presented with photographs or other materials by a fictional archivist (George MacKay), even as contemporary musicians interpret Faithfull\u2019s work or reflect on her influence.<\/p>\n
Filmmaker Forsyth said he saw the film as a portrait of the artist, rather than a documentary.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you think of all of the great portraits throughout history, the paintings, the photography, that has captured the essence of someone, they all do it in some sort of way collaborating with their subject,\u201d Forsyth told a press conference Saturday.<\/p>\n
As a format, documentary \u201ccarries with it a journalistic kind of baggage\u201d that did not fit the filmmakers\u2019 purposes, Pollard said.<\/p>\n
She conceded that Faithfull was initially \u201crightfully wary\u201d of the idea of the fictional institution scouring her past.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I think she could recognise very quickly in the days that we were filming with her how it allowed a freedom to be able to open up and explore to look back and reconsider,\u201d Pollard said.<\/p>\n
She called for \u201curgent recalibration of some brilliant artists\u2019 legacies that are just simply going to be forgotten or misrepresented.\u201d<\/p>\n
In recent years, the British pop-rock balladeer, who released more than 20 albums during her career, battled illness, including breast cancer and a severe bout of Covid.<\/p>\n
In the film, Faithfull is in a wheelchair and wearing a nasal cannula for oxygen.<\/p>\n
The film on her is one of several documentaries by international directors in the Venice festival running through September 6 on the Lido, including Gianfranco Rosi\u2019s ode to Naples, Sotto le Nuvole\u00a0(Under the Clouds) and Ghost Elephants\u00a0from Werner Herzog.<\/p>\n
Hidden worlds –<\/p>\n
Sotto le Nuvole\u00a0is a black-and-white look at Naples and the volcanoes hovering around it, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, where near-daily earthquakes \u201care a source of destabilisation, fear and a sense of precariousness,\u201d Rosi told journalists.<\/p>\n
Cutting back and forth with images of steam rising from the volcanoes, the film goes underground, under the yet-unexcavated depths of Herculaneum or the bowels of Naples\u2019 archaeology museum, where dusty statues and busts are silent witness to past eras.<\/p>\n
A sense of unease hovers throughout the film, which follows tomb raiders\u2019 tunnels and includes calls from anxious citizens to the fire department after earthquakes.<\/p>\n
The film, which took three years to edit, is the only documentary in the main competition, where 21 works are vying for the top Golden Lion prize.<\/p>\n
Ghost Elephants by Herzog, who received a lifetime achievement award during the festival\u2019s opening ceremony, follows the search for an elusive\u2014and possibly nonexistant\u2014new species of elephant in the high-altitude forests of Angola.<\/p>\n
Another documentary taking the viewer to hidden worlds is Massimiliano Camaiti\u2019s Agnus Dei, shot inside a Rome cloister where each spring the nuns raise a pair of lambs for their wool, which they weave into a vestment for the pope.<\/p>\n
The documentary was filmed during the hospitalisation and death of Pope Francis, and the election of new Pope Leo. \u2014 AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VENICE, Sept 1 \u2014 A new documentary about British singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull urges viewers to take a fresh…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[63767,49,48,75,63768,62452,41580,337,49093,58076],"class_list":["post-113011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-broken-english-documentary","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-jane-pollard-and-iain-forsyth","tag-marianne-faithfull","tag-mick-jagger","tag-movies","tag-tilda-swinton","tag-venice-film-festival-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}