Rome (AFP)

The Venice Film Festival opens Wednesday with many stars expected, but while voices rise to criticize the low number of women directors in competition and the selection of controversial filmmakers such as Roman Polanski and Nate Parker.

The Mostra, the world's oldest film festival and launching pad for the Oscars, will feature 21 feature films in competition for the famous Lion d'Or. It will be awarded on Saturday, September 7 on the Lido by a jury chaired by the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel.

Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, Gong Li, Penélope Cruz and rocker Mick Jagger will star in a festival that will focus on stars, big Hollywood productions and directors expected.

It will open Wednesday with French stars Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, the poster of "The Truth" of the Japanese Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Cannes Palme d'Or in 2018 for "A family affair".

For the French, Olivier Assayas will step on the red carpet thanks to "Wasp Network" with Penélope Cruz, on the true story of five Cuban spies during the Castro period, and Robert Guédiguian with "Gloria Mundi", where play his favorite actors Ariane Ascaride and Jean-Pierre Daroussin.

In the middle of this promising poster, the presence of only two female directors in the running - Saudi woman Haifaa Al-Mansour with "The Perfect Candidate", and Australian Shannon Murphy with "Babyteeth" - after only one last year, made cringe feminists.

And especially as the Cannes Film Festival this year has selected four female directors in competition, and the Berlinale seven. The Mostra, she had already been criticized for its low number of women last year.

- "Deaf" -

Another subject that has begun to make a lot of ink: the presence in competition of "J'accuse", the latest film by Franco-Polish director Roman Polanski, historical thriller on the Dreyfus Affair with Jean Dujardin.

A selection that goes wrong, while the filmmaker of 86 years, excluded from the Academy of Oscars last year, is still being sued by the American justice for the rape of a teenager in 1977.

"A rapist, two women directors competing, what else have I missed?", Tweeted after the announcement of the selection in late July the founder of the women and Hollywood lobby group, Melissa Silverstein, for whom the Festival "is completely deaf to issues related to #MeToo and Time's Up".

"It's as if they like to be the last of the dinosaurs," added Laura Kaehr, co-chair of the Swiss Women's Audiovisual Network (SWAN), quoted by The Hollywood Reporter.

The director of the Mostra, Alberto Barbera, tried to defend his choice. "We are here to see works of art, not to judge the person behind," he pleaded late July to the Hollywood Reporter.

But he has trouble convincing, especially since the Mostra announced, since, the presence in a parallel section of "American Skin", the new film of the American director of "The Birth of a Nation", Nate Parker, acquitted in 2011 of the rape of a student. This case had grown in 2016 after the revelation of her suicide.

The Mostra also decided to show out of competition an inverted version of the very sulphurous "Irreversible" of Gaspar Noé. A choice criticized by some, while this film, which tells a revenge after an unsustainable rape of ten minutes, was scandalous in Cannes in 2002.

But the Festival, he argues that this selection will be marked by a reflection on the condition of women. Several feature films in competition, "reveal a new sensitivity, even when made by men," said Alberto Barbera.

© 2019 AFP