True, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” “Drive,” “The Tree of Life” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” among others, were not on the list of 10 nominees unveiled today, and that isn’t promising for any of them. “Bridesmaids,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” and “The Ides of March,” meanwhile, made the cut, which seems to move each a little closer to an Oscar nomination.

But the Producers Guild has its likes and dislikes, and they don’t necessarily match those of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives the Oscars.

From 2001 to 2010 the producers’ nominees matched up with those in the Academy’s best picture category about 80 percent of the time. But the mismatches may not have been entirely random.

At least eight films, or about 60 percent of those nominated by the Academy but overlooked by the producers — including “The Pianist” and “Atonement” — were set and filmed abroad, for instance. That could mean that the Academy’s British contingent carries more weight than the producers’ own cosmopolites.

Even more strikingly, the producers bypassed both “The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry, and “The Hours,” another Daldry film — much as it overlooked his “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” this year — though both of those earlier films were ultimately nominated for best picture Oscars. The producers haven’t been charmed by Mr. Daldry’s work since “Billy Elliot,” but he’s done better with the Academy.

Really small films sometimes slip through the producers’ net, as did “In the Bedroom” and “Winter’s Bone” in prior years. That might give hope to, say, “Margin Call” or “Drive.”

On the flip side, the producers have a soft spot for commercial hits. “Shrek,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” “Star Trek” and “The Dark Knight” were nominated for producers’ awards without getting a best picture nomination from the Academy. So “Bridesmaids,” this year’s pop darling, is not home free quite yet.

The Artist took three awards, including best picture for a musical or comedy, and best actor in a musical or comedy for Jean Dujardin. Alexander Payne’s family drama The Descendants claimed two – for best drama and dramatic actor for George Clooney.

Meryl Streep won for dramatic actress as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, her eighth win at the Globes – and surpised the audience with a string of expletives in her acceptance speech when she fumbled for her spectacles.

Michelle Williams won for actress in a musical or comedy as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, 52 years after Monroe’s win for the same prize at the Globes; while Christopher Plummer won best supporting actor for his portrayal an elderly widower who comes out as gay in the Mike Mills’s Beginners.

Martin Scorsese took the best director gong for Hugo, the third directing Globe in the last 10 years for Scorsese, who previously won for Gangs of New York and The Departed and received the show’s Cecil B DeMille Award for lifetime achievement two years ago.

The show was hosted by Ricky Gervais – who not quite the same version of himself that hosted last year’s event, when he attracted criticism for an extended absence from stage and for striking an ungenerous tone.

There was nothing as jolting as his pointed jabs at Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr last year. Many felt he spent more of his time making jokes about how controversial he was going to be than he did actually being controversial, although a riff on Jodie Foster’s film The Beaver did raise eyebrows.

It fell to the actors and their acceptance speeches to showstop: Octavia Spencer delivered a humble and moving speech when she collected her supporting actress award for The Help. Claire Danes had a great moment when she picked up best actress in a television drama for her work in Homeland; she was finally able to thank her parents, whom she had regretted leaving out of her speech when she won the same award in 1994 for My So-Called Life.

The awards themselves were, with one or two exceptions, largely predictable. although Scorsese’s award for his work on Hugo was something of a surprise.

Jessica Lange emerged as a bit of an upset when she won best supporting television actress for her work in the popular but polarising American Horror Story. Aside from that there wasn’t much to upset the bidding pools, with The Descendants and The Artist emerging as the big winners on the film side, while Modern Family and Homeland secured the major prizes on the television side.

The effect derives from her androgynous beauty, of course: the luminous, almost translucent skin, the sleek planes of her face, the architectural sweep of David Bowie-blond hair and the twiglike frame. For when Ms. Swinton speaks, she becomes unmistakably human: funny, friendly, thoughtful, intelligent but unpretentious.

The planet she refers to is not an actual one, needless to say, or even the busy world of Hollywood, but the place she literally lives. “I live in a part of Scotland where people are more likely to talk about problems with greenfly” than news of the film world, she says, referring to an insect more commonly known in planet America as the aphid. Despite her increasingly high profile as an actress with one of those coveted gold statuettes to her name — she took home a supporting actress Oscar for “Michael Clayton” in 2008 — Ms. Swinton insists she inhabits the world of mainstream film only as an alien visitor. In Scotland she lives with her twin children and her partner, the painter Sandro Kopp. (Sensational rumors from a few years ago that Ms. Swinton, Mr. Kopp and Ms. Swinton’s former partner, John Byrne, were all cohabitating, were false.)

“Aside from the odd skirmish, such as going to Cannes, Scotland is where I live year round. I have no other home,” she says. “When I visit Hollywood, I come in and out like a tourist, and I am really happy to be a tourist.”

She is in the middle of one such skirmish, in New York to promote her latest movie, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” an elliptical psychodrama about a mother whose son commits an atrocity that leaves her feeling alienated and complicit. Directed by Lynne Ramsay (“Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar”), the movie exerts an unsettling, hallucinatory pull, in part because it relies more on imagery than language to draw us inside the spiraling thoughts of the central character. (Contra the title, which comes from the 2003 Lionel Shriver novel that “inspired” the film, as Ms. Swinton prefers to say, nobody does much talking about Kevin.)

Odd though it may seem for a woman who speaks with such lucidity and fluidity, it was precisely the general absence of conventional dialogue that drew her to the role.

“For me that is grace,” she says of her character’s dumbstruck confusion in the face of her irrevocably altered life. “I am really interested in silence. In inarticulacy also, which isn’t the same as silence. As a performer I like looking at the gaps between what people want to communicate and what they can communicate,” she adds. “I love good filmmaking that isn’t just about really proficient writers of dialogue, who think that everybody’s really articulate and everybody can hear each other really well. That doesn’t feel true to me, actually. I mean, that’s a fantastical universe.”

The idea certainly resonates in “Kevin,” through which Ms. Swinton’s character often wanders like a mute ghost, replaying a troubled past through the prism of an anguished mind. It also applies to Ms. Swinton’s quietly charged performance in “I Am Love” (2009), in which she plays a Milanese wife whose insular world is shattered by the discovery of erotic love. Her character in that movie, a Russian in the alien world of Italian high society, is similarly withdrawn, living inside her head until a sensual awakening changes the pattern of her life. Ms. Swinton, 51, says she is drawn to characters confronting these moments of crisis, when the trajectory of a life is radically altered.

“I’m constantly reading about actors who call themselves storytellers. I’m more of a micro-dotter,” she says. “I like to isolate the spirit of a moment, in particular the moment when the ‘me’ that I was is forced to change.”

Robert Salerno, a producer of “Kevin,” points to Ms. Swinton’s ability to illuminate her character’s interior life without a lot of dialogue as central to the film’s power. “A lot of her performance comes from her eyes and her facial expressions, and as an actress that can be even more complicated than working with dialogue,” Mr. Salerno says. “Tilda makes the audience feel the pain and torment this character goes through almost wordlessly.”

Mr. Salerno was also impressed by how completely Ms. Swinton was engaged in the film’s progress from its inception to its completion. “She was very involved, even before I came aboard, and was always wanting to know what she could do to help the process along,” he says. “Lynne is a filmmaker with a particular approach, and in this case she needed to feel a little of the chaos that the characters in the film are going through, and Tilda completely embraced what Lynne needed.”

Although she has forged a career that marries two ideals that rarely intersect — the respect accorded actors who venture deep into the thickets of art house cinema, and the headier remuneration and broader exposure that are the fruits of the realm she refers to repeatedly as “industrial filmmaking” — Ms. Swinton makes it clear that there has been little or no design in the pattern of her life. This may be why she finds such richness in roles requiring her characters to diverge from the “menu” of life choices they’ve been given, as she puts it.
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Myles Aronowitz/Warner Brothers, via Photofest
Tilda Swinton as a high-powered corporate lawyer in “Michael Clayton” (2007), for which she won a supporting actress Oscar.

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“I’ve been making it up as I go along,” she confides. “In fact I never set out to be an actor. Still am not, really. I slid into performing at the point at which I stopped writing.”

Ms. Swinton, who comes from established Scottish stock (her father was a highly decorated major in the British Army), studied literature at Cambridge, where she wrote poetry. “I slid sideways into the theater, basically because of the company I was keeping,” she says, “and a feeling of experimenting with friends who were really into theater. I was totally undriven.”

Early stage ventures, including a short stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company, convinced her that theater “wasn’t the right trousers,” as she idiomatically puts it. She slid on a new pair when she met the experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman, with whom she formed an artistic collaboration that only ended with his death in 1994 from complications from AIDS. They made films together — larger and smaller, scrappy and polished — although it was Ms. Swinton’s role as the swashbuckling, gender-changing title character in Sally Potter’s “Orlando” (1992), based on the Virginia Woolf novel, that brought her to international attention.

“The way I worked with Derek and Sally during those first nine years was really spoiling, really specific,” she remembers. “And, I now realize, really rare. It put me up a gum tree. It didn’t get me any closer to being a proper actor or involved with industrial cinema. It was where I learned to work collectively and it’s where I learned what producing is and it’s where I learned at one remove the job of filmmaking. Those directors expected their team to all be filmmakers. That’s not an orthodox actor’s training. When Derek died and when ‘Orlando’ was done, I was no closer to having what you call a career.”

Her entry into industrial filmmaking — the phrase is catchy, and appropriate — came as haphazardly as her sideways tilt into an acting career. After her acclaimed performance in the independent movie “The Deep End” (2001), as the mother of a gay son she suspects has committed a murder, offers from filmmakers from outside her family of collaborators started to come. But Ms. Swinton finds that there is a natural continuity between the two kinds of work.

“The truth is, in 25 years I’ve only made about five or six true studio films, and to me all of them have been with experimental filmmakers,” she says. “It may be that David Fincher has $200 million or whatever to make a movie, but like the other directors I’ve worked with he is always messing with the form and still working in a way that felt familiar to me. Or when I was working on ‘Constantine,’ and there was all this tech geek stuff going on, it felt a lot like back when I was doing a Pet Shop Boys video with Derek Jarman, shooting it against a blue screen.”

Ms. Swinton seems content to allow the flow of career to unfold without conscious direction, caring primarily for the filmmaking company she keeps. “My habit, which I cannot imagine breaking, is the dependence on the relationship with the filmmaker,” she says, noting that friendships with both Luca Guadagnino, the director of “I Am Love,” and Ms. Ramsay, the Scottish director, preceded her collaborations with both. “That’s what I’m in it for.”

She and Mr. Guadagnino have hatched a plan to film a remake of “Auntie Mame,” with Ms. Swinton in the title role. It is hard to picture Ms. Swinton, whose characters on screen often seem to be reverberating with repression, as the flamboyant celebrator of life in Patrick Dennis’s novel. Although she does reveal a mischievous streak in person, as well as an unexpected taste for lowbrow popular culture. (When told that the humor in “The Book of Mormon” is predominantly juvenile, she lights up with glee.) Her disaffection for theater has kept her away from the stage for decades, and yet she doesn’t disdain it entirely. “I love live performance,” she says. “But the theater I prefer is the theater of the music hall, or the Saturday matinee when some TV star comes on, and everybody claps.”

But Ms. Swinton circles repeatedly back to the idea of all human behavior as a kind of performance, an idea that the self-dramatizing Mame might well espouse. What attracts her to acting, a profession in which she still seems to feel she is an apprentice practitioner, Oscar and critical acclaim notwithstanding, is the mystery of what resides behind the masks people wear.

“Starting to imagine or to notice how inscrutable we all are to one another, that’s where my interest in wanting to be a performer came from,” she says. Referring to the central incident in “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” and perhaps to many another contemporary horror, she continues: “People perpetrate atrocities and other people say, ‘We didn’t see it coming.’ The idea that people actually wear themselves on their faces seems to me to be less real than what life actually is, which is a series of concealments and containments.

“These surfaces and veils exist,” she continues, warming to her theme. “We take off one for one person, and several for another. But there is always a difference between what you show to others and what you show to yourself in the mirror.”

The actor’s challenge, and it is one that Ms. Swinton meets with a rare clarity and precision, is to explore this process of concealment and revelation. Meanwhile we in the audience, gazing into the mirror of art, can perhaps come a little closer to seeing ourselves.

The movie industry’s self-congratulatory season is typically well defined by now, with favorites firmly established and potential dark horses looming. But consensus has yet to form fully around any film this year, perhaps because an unusual number of top contenders are arriving late.

Leading the Globes nominations with six was “The Artist,” a black-and-white silent film from the French director Michel Hazanavicius. That film, backed by the awards maven Harvey Weinstein, got most of its nods in major categories, including best comedy. “This movie is a love letter to Hollywood, and it’s an indescribable joy to receive this news,” Mr. Hazanavicius said in an e-mail.

Two films were a whisker behind with five nominations each: “The Descendants,”Alexander Payne’s drama about a Hawaiian land baron and his splintered family, and “The Help,” about black maids in the 1960s and the white families they serve. Both were nominated for best drama, a category that also included “Moneyball,” “War Horse,” “The Ides of March” and “Hugo.” Hollywood, of course, paid just as much attention (or more) to the snubs.

Perhaps most notable was the complete shutout of an expected Oscar darling, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” a post-Sept. 11 drama from the director Stephen Daldry and the producer Scott Rudin. This film, with Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock among its stars, may have suffered from its direct look at the emotional impact of the terror attacks.

“Those who love it love it passionately, and those who resist it find it too tough as an emotional experience,” Mr. Rudin said in an e-mail on Thursday.

Steven Spielberg also got slapped, with his “War Horse,” a look at World War I through equine eyes, picking up only a pair of nominations — the same number of nominations that voters gave Madonna’s critically drubbed “W.E.”

Focus Features failed to get any nominations for“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,”while Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” got only a lone acknowledgment, for Leonardo DiCaprio as best actor.

On a happier side of the scale voters gave a somewhat puzzling boost to “The Ides of March,”George Clooney’s political drama; it had meager ticket sales and has so far been of minor note on the awards trail, but it walked away with four Globe nominations. The support of“Ides of March”by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the 90-member group that gives out the Globes, presents an unusual twist: a group of foreign journalists buying into a picture about American politics that hasn’t fared so well with the home crowd.

Awards strategists noted that both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were invited back. Mr. Pitt was singled out as a best actor nominee for his baseball executive in “Moneyball,” which received four nods total. Not to leave him without a date at the ceremony, the organization nominated “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” which marks Ms. Jolie’s debut as a director, for best foreign film. The Globes are not taken seriously as artistic milestones and have a history of voting idiosyncrasies;“True Grit”got no Globe nominations last year, for instance, but went on to receive 10 nominations at the Academy Awards. The organization is still mocked for naming Pia Zadora new star of the year in 1981.

Studios also complain that the group tends to nominate based on star wattage instead of performance in an attempt to orchestrate a red-carpet spectacle. Madonna was the best example of that this year. Awards strategists also pointed to nominations for Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet as best actress for“Carnage.”Still, Hollywood picks over the Globes for clues about the Oscar race. The best picture Oscar has mirrored the Golden Globes’ choice for best drama or best comedy-musical about two-thirds of the time over the last two decades. The Globes as Oscar forecaster did not work last year, with “The Social Network” beating out “The King’s Speech,” which won the Academy Award for best picture.

Studios also rely on Globe nominations to fuel ticket sales and lift movies out of the year-end multiplex pile-up; this year pictures like “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” which received two nominations, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” “War Horse” and “The Iron Lady” (starring Meryl Streep, who landed her 25th Globe nomination for the part) are among the films arriving around Christmas.

The nominations were announced shortly after 5 a.m. Pacific Time. A full list of nominees can be found here.

Regardless of the quirky nature of the Globes, nominees reacted with practiced graciousness.Glenn Close, nominated for best actress in a drama for her gender-bending role in “Albert Nobbs,” called the attention an “extraordinary honor”; that film also received nominations for best supporting actress (Janet McTeer) and original song (Ms. Close and Brian Byrne). “The whole ‘Albert Nobbs’ team is walking on air,” Ms. Close said.

Viggo Mortensen, nominated for best supporting actor for playing Sigmund Freud in David Cronenberg’s “Dangerous Method,” said it was “a pleasant surprise,” but lamented that Mr. Cronenberg was overlooked in the directing category. In the comedy-musical category Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” was the standout nominee with four, including best director and best comedy. The other nominees for best comedy-musical were “50/50,” the true story of a man dealing with cancer; “Bridesmaids”and“My Week With Marilyn.”

GOLDEN GLOBES
While the movie awards receive most of the attention because of their proximity to the Oscar race, the Globes ceremony relies on television categories for much of its star power. Marquee names nominated for TV work this year include Jessica Lange (“American Horror Story”),Matt LeBlanc (“Episodes”) and, as usual,Tina Fey(“30 Rock”).

“Glee” fell off the nominations map — that Fox series got five nods last year and only one on Thursday — as HBO, always an outsize presence at the Globes, increased its stranglehold. That premium cable network received 18 nominations, the most of any TV company; Showtime was a distant second with eight.

About 17 million people watched the live Globes telecast last year, on par with the year before. By comparison, about 38 million people watched last year’s Oscar telecast.

The British comedian Ricky Gervais will return for the third year as host of the show, scheduled for Jan. 15 on NBC. Last year Mr. Gervais overshadowed the ceremony with a series of barbed remarks about celebrities in attendance, as well as the association itself. (On Thursday Aida Takla-O’Reilly, president of the association, referred to Mr. Gervais as “a naughty, naughty schoolboy.”)

But the real drama with the Globes continues to happen behind the scenes. Two lawsuits filed shortly before last January’s show have since blossomed into furious legal battles.

One case centers on what the foreign press association said was an attempt by Dick Clark Productions and its owner to hijack the ceremony by unilaterally negotiating a new agreement with NBC. Dick Clark Productions is once again staging the show, but its lawyers are prepping for a shootout with the association over the NBC contract at a trial that is set to begin on Jan. 24 in United States District Court in Los Angeles.

Juicier are a cluster of three suits in which Michael Russell, a former Globes publicist, and others claim that the press association is corrupt, pointing to the acceptance by some members of what the suit called “payola” from studios lobbying on behalf of certain actors and films.

The organization shot back with a suit charging Mr. Russell and associates with commandeering its charitable activities for their own benefit. Its latest amended complaint, filed with the Los Angeles County Superior Court in late October, stretched to 591 pages, including exhibits.

Moreover, many of the latest Iranian films—many made by women—discuss women’s roles in Iran and how they have been developing in a country where politics, religion, and culture are deeply intertwined. Indeed, creativity often feeds off censorship. As Ms. Negar Mottahedeh, an associate professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University and author of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema, told CNN, “film cultures have flourished oftentimes when they have been under restrictions.”

Post-revolution Iranian cinema has been praised both domestically and internationally for bringing attention to critical issues the country has been dealing with during the past three decades. By connecting people outside of Iran to Persian society and culture, Iranian filmmakers have opened up the industry to a new audience. Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, the Netherlands and Australia host Iranian film festivals. “It is a cinema that’s very engaged first with its own cinema history and culture,” Mr. Shannon Kelley, the head of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Film & Television Archive, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s also a very internationally informed cinema with techniques as sophisticated as what anybody else is doing in the world. The beauty of their work translates to other cultures.”

Problems faced by the industry

But the Iranian film industry has significant barriers to face within Iran. Strict censorship laws often prohibit the distribution of many of Iran’s internationally acclaimed films within the country itself. Mr. Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, which won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and the US National Society of Film Critic’s award for best foreign language film in 1999, is banned in Iran allegedly because of its incorporation of suicide as a theme. Mr. Jafar Panahi’s films Offside and The Circle, the latter of which won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion prize in 2000, are also banned in Iran; both films deal with women’s rights.

Censorship also creates problems when it comes to the production of films in Iran, such as with Offside, which depicts a group of women who dress up as men in order to attend soccer games in Iran. The film had to be shot in secret, and as Mr. Panahi described to National Public Radio, it was no easy feat: “Everything is taking place in secret. Nobody knows about it. They were actually hiding in a car, sitting there and shooting, and the actress runs to the stadium to get in. She’s arrested, and she’s beaten up, and they arrest all of them and put them in a car. And I go and tell them that, ‘If you do this, I will tell everyone about it,’ so they finally let them go.” Mr. Panahi also said that his lead actress was momentarily traumatized by the experience.

Moreover, Iranians involved in the film industry live under close scrutiny, and participation in activities considered illicit by the government often lands them in trouble. BBC News reported in August 2001 that Ms. Tahmineh Milani, a filmmaker who often incorporates themes of liberalism and feminism in her work, was arrested for her stances. A statement from the public relations office of Tehran’s Islamic Revolution Court said that Ms. Milani “showed support in her work for the counter-revolutionary groups which wage war against God” and that she had “exploited art.”

The months surrounding the elections in Iran were especially ripe with trouble for filmmakers. In 2009, the AP reported that Mr. Bahman Ghobadi, whose film No One Knows About Persian Cats was featured at the Cannes Film Festival, had been arrested upon returning to Iran; he was accused of criticizing the Iranian government while at Cannes. Also that year, the AFP reported that Mr. Panahi had been arrested along with his wife and daughter at a commemoration for protestors killed in Iran’s post-election violence, and Reuters reported that Iranian actress Ms. Fatemeh Motamed-Arya and movie producer Mr. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb were forbidden from leaving the country by Iranian authorities because of their activities after the elections.

Censorship: past, present, and future

Despite the obstacles faced by the Iranian film industry, optimism remains that it will continue to flourish internationally and domestically. Ms. Motamed-Arya told AFP while attending the 2005 KaraFilm festival in Karachi, Pakistan that she believed Iranian film had a steady future ahead: “Iran is a magical country and you can’t say what is coming next, and I can’t say whether change will come in cinema in the near future or not. But I have not lost the hope for better Iranian cinema.”

But what exactly would this “better Iranian cinema” entail? And how would such improvements be achieved? Ms. Motamed-Arya, for one, believes that the removal of censorship in Iran would allow filmmakers to explore diverse topics without anticipating film-bans, and would also allow an Iranian audience to experience a different cinema than what exists today. She also believes the complete censorship on films showing sex, violence, or alcohol leaves filmmakers with limited topics and themes to pursue.

The film industry’s battle with censorship began following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when strict censorship laws were enacted that forbade films to depict couples touching or a woman to appear on screen without wearing Islamic garments that hid her hair and body shape. Permits for scripts and film production became harder to attain, and the censoring government created dilemmas for filmmakers who had to choose between the films that they wanted to produce and those that were allowed.

Some believe that the censorship and government control motivates filmmakers to push creative boundaries, which leads to more affecting films. Mr. Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, told CNN that the impact of the Islamic Revolution created “a condition of creativity to express the trauma that the nation has experienced,” and that censorship created a barrier that filmmakers have to cross in creative ways.

On the other hand, people from Iran’s film community rebuke the perspective that censorship can be an asset. Ms. Maziar Bahari, a documentary-maker, told The Guardian that she found it patronizing when censorship was credited for the industry’s boom: “I think romanticizing censorship is a great disservice to Iranian artists. Censorship has had a negative effect on Iranian arts for centuries. I believe without censorship we would have many other great artists and filmmakers whose talent and effort cannot bear fruit because of governmental, religious and social restrictions.”

For films to be produced or shown domestically, they must succumb to rigorous inspection by Iranian authorities and often have to give in to heavy censorship. Directors who have yielded to government demands in order for their films to reach a local audience described the feeling of doing so as demeaning to their work and to themselves. Mr. Babak Payami, director of Silence Between Two Thoughts, told The Guardian that he was crushed after the first version of this film was seized by Iranian security agents and he had to make a second edition, which he felt did not live up to his original vision. “I was alone in a little lab and I cried my eyes out through the entire film,” he said.

Mr. Bahman Farmanara’s feelings echoed Mr. Payami’s following the censorship of his film, A House Built on Water. The film won five awards at Iran’s Fajr International Film Festival in 2002, but after its premiere, numerous cuts were demanded by Iranian authorities and three scenes had to be deleted.

In 2008, AFP published an open letter signed by about 50 Iranian filmmakers who wished to alert the public to their feelings about the country’s censorship laws. The letter said: “The lack of attention to the cultural cinema, which is considered a national asset, is worrying. The decision-makers in cinema, instead of coming up with ways to reach more elevated national and international horizons, have isolated and even deleted this kind of cinema from public audiences.”

In response, Mohammad Hossein Safar Harandi, Iran’s minister of culture at the time, protested that films the government chose to censor were “distant from family and ethical values,” and that their negativity was the reason they should be stopped.

Finding ways around censorship

For filmmakers who refuse to succumb to censorship, filming in locations away from Iran is a popular option. According to CBC News, Mr. Mohsen Makhmalbaf opted to film in Afghanistan rather than Iran because he felt this would allow him greater control over production. But he also emphasized that external locations are not a viable solution to overcome censorship. Mr. Makhmalbaf believes that if Iran continues to implement censorship laws, other filmmakers will follow his example and pursue production elsewhere, pushing Iranian artists out of their country.

Iranian filmmakers also often turn to other alternative topics that are less likely to incur inquisition and censorship from the government. According to Mr. Dan De Luce of The Guardian, it is government restrictions, especially those concerning the portrayal of women, that explain why some of the greatest Iranian films focus on children’s lives or portray life outside on the street rather than inside the home. Ms. Motamed-Arya also believes that this is a common occurrence, but that searching for acceptable topics is not an easy task.

Censorship not only creates problems for filmmakers, but it also makes film distribution a challenge. Mr. Sid Ganis, the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, told CNN that it was hard to get Iranian films distributed in Iran not only because of the small number of cinemas, but also because of the government’s intrusion on the distribution process.

Distribution challenges force the Iranian people to turn to illicit methods, like piracy, to view films that are prohibited by the government. An Iranian man who makes a business of selling pirated DVDs told AFP: “I usually sell between 50 to 80 DVDs per day for 20,000 rials each. The business is good. …I will have my long list of customers as long as these films are not shown in cinemas.” But while piracy may allow for local access to banned Iranian films, it has an inherently negative element in that no proceeds from film sales go to the film’s producers, impairing the economy of the Iranian film industry.

The Iranian film industry may have its barriers, but it is bolstered by the support of the Iranian people, and seems to continue to thrive. Individuals like Mr. Ali Afsahi, an Iranian cleric who was arrested in 2006 for educating students about the various media of film, continues to believe that education and dialogue can lead to more freedom for the film industry in Iran with the added bonus of improving Iran’s relations with other countries through art. He told BBC News: “Film is a very important medium, and they must understand that before they repel it. I try to expand the idea that we must know each other… we must make a dialogue…”

Initially, McQueen says, he wanted to shoot the film in London, but “nobody would speak to us there,” he says. After locating experts in the field of sex addiction, he and screenwriter Abi Morgan traveled to New York and met with them and some of their patients before working on the script. “The research told us what to do. I don’t want to put a stencil on the subject matter,” he says.
The resulting film offers an unflinching look—with plenty of full frontal nudity—at a disease that people often dismiss as a joke. Fox Searchlight bought the distribution rights after the Venice Film Festival, knowing full well that “Shame” would likely garner an NC-17 rating, the first major studio release in four years to do so. [For more see "Shame' Tries to Seduce Audiences—With an NC-17."]

Speakeasy caught up with McQueen, wearing jeans, a navy mock-turtleneck sweater and vintage-style glasses, for coffee at the Bowery Hotel and talked about free will, the director’s close relationship with Fassbender, and why “New York, New York” is really a blues song. Excerpts:

This film seems to be about people who, outwardly at least, look like they’ve got it together, but deep down they’re falling apart.

The film is about ritualization, the whole idea of here’s somebody who has an apartment, a job, and this deep dark secret. Through our research—mine and (screenwriter) Abi Morgan’s—we found a lot of that was happening. There’s this kind of self preservation, a delusion of control.

This brother and sister, Brandon and Sissy (Carey Mulligan), are obviously extremely dysfunctional. Yet you never get the full backstory about their upbringing. Why did you decide to leave it ambiguous?

When people come to the cinema and sit down, they bring their history, their present and their past with them. So when they see something on the screen they have an idea of what it could possibly be, and that’s exactly what it is. It’s a respect for audiences: an audience member has an idea of what might have happened, and I think that’s enough. Sometimes you come into a story in the middle of someone’s life.

You wrote the screenplay after you and Abi Morgan did your research?

Yes. This was all about receiving shit. It is not about history or a costume drama or something that happened yesterday. To me, the film was like a dog whistle going off in the cinema.

Sex addiction is something you hear about in the media, typically when a male celebrity cheats on his wife and then goes to rehab. Was it something you had thought about a lot?

When I first heard about it I was really laughing, thinking “What is this?” But it’s similar to a person who is an alcoholic, and you see him at a Christmas party and he’s a great drunk having lots of fun. But when you realize this person has to drink two bottles of vodka to get through the day, you see it’s not fun anymore. It’s the same thing with sex addiction. There’s a wonderful line that sexual addiction has as much to do with sex as alcoholism has to do with being thirsty.

What attracted you to this subject matter?

It all started with a conversation with Abi Morgan about the Internet, really, and pornography. It was about access and abundance. It was the drama of it—in order to sustain this addiction you need another person. It was interesting to me. I started thinking about the “Lost Weekend” by Billy Wilder, which was a revelation at the time…and “The Man with the Golden Arm” with Frank Sinatra.

There’s one scene in the film where Carey Mulligan’s character, Sissy, sings “New York, New York” but in a very sad, wistful way. Why did you choose that song?

I liked the idea that she was a performer and I love the way that she uses this song to communicate. I read the lyrics and thought, “This is a blues.” It’s not Liza Minnelli6 or Frank Sinatra singing in an up-tempo fashion. If you read the lyrics, it’s the blues. So that was it. It’s the only time in the movie when Sissy has a direct communication to Brandon. His barriers start to drop. He’s a very locked person, and that lock begins to sort of open.

“Hunger” made about $154,000 at the box office in the U.S. “Shame,” which was acquired by Fox Searchlight after the Venice Film Festival, is perhaps a little more commercial, though I wonder how they will market a movie about a sex addict.

I have never been interested in whether a movie is commercial. All I think about is, “is it good or not?” I am happy that Fox bought it and I am extraordinarily grateful, because it means that more people will get to see the movie.

There’s a lot of nudity in this film. What are your views about an NC-17 rating?

The only reason people are talking about that is because of Michael [Fassbender’s] nudity. If it was a woman in full frontal nudity, nobody would even raise an eyebrow. But it’s a man. The whole thing is a bit ridiculous. This is a serious movie. It’s not a movie about people blowing each other’s heads off with AK-47s. I never held a gun in my hand in my entire life, but apparently that’s more acceptable than people showing their private parts.

You’re credited with reviving Michael Fassbender’s career, and bringing him to a mainstream audience.

When we made “Hunger,” it wasn’t even a low expectation, there was no expectation. So I think we in some ways came through this situation together. That has been a very good bonding experience. I definitely feel like I am on a journey with Michael. It’s a lot like falling in love. When you fall in love with somebody, you want to hold onto it and keep it. Because it doesn’t happen every day.

Are you making another feature film now with Michael?

Yes, I’m making another film, but I don’t know if he’s involved or not. It’s called “Twelve Years a Slave” and it’s produced by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. it’s about a native New Yorker in 1875 who was kidnapped into slavery. It’s a period drama, so slightly more expensive [than previous films.]

What was it about him initially that made you want to cast him in “Hunger”?

Well, initially I didn’t like him at all. After the audition, I thought, “Who is this guy?” Being an actor, you need to get rejected a lot. And he had gone through a lot of rejection by the time he came in. He was sulky. I called him back because I wanted to see him with other people, and then during the second audition I saw the spark. And that was it. By the time he was in “Hunger” he was already 31. A lot of people felt like he should have made it already as an actor.

You have a reputation of being extremely detail oriented. How did that manifest itself in this film, about a man who is in many ways totally obsessive?

Brandon’s character liked Bach, particularly the Goldberg Variations—this whole idea of these kinds of mathematical equations to impose order. When we put the film together there’s a scene when Brandon puts Bach on the record player. But the music sounded too clean. I realized it was a digital format of this record. I said “No, no, no, no! We’ve gotta buy the vinyl online and re-record it on a record player.” I had to get that specific sound.

You went to NYU film school but dropped out during your first semester, right?

Yes, I was there for three months. It was like a tiny circus. I came from art school beforehand, was used to much more experimental techniques. It was really difficult for me to be in a situation of an industry, and not of art. It wasn’t compatible with me. The reason I went to NYU was because of people like Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch. I remember talking to Jim, and he got into NYU through his poetry and photographs. You can’t do that anymore. What it did to me was to demystify the whole idea of American filmmaking. I thought, “We’re just as good as them.”

At a festival dominated by news of “The Tree of Life” and “Melancholia,” few critics would have predicted that a comedian could win a prize and the international recognition that went with it. Mr. Dujardin’s imitations and spoofs, while memorable, do not match the traditional criteria of the Cannes jury, which typically favors performances in social dramas and tragedies.

But Mr. Dujardin’s turn in “The Artist” as George Valentin, a suave lighthearted star of Hollywood silent pictures who falls into depression and oblivion after the rise of talkies, doesn’t fit neatly into any categories, nor does the movie, a largely dialogueless black-and-white homage to early films.

Reviews from Cannes were effusive. Calling the movie “a surefire crowd pleaser and a magnificent piece of filmmaking,” Geoffrey Macnab of The Independent in Britain, heaped praise on its lead: “Dujardin’s performance is a revelation. He has the carefree quality and the athleticism of a Fairbanks in his pomp.” The Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan charted the film’s rise from underdog to festival darling, concluding, “The Oscar drums have started to beat louder.”

But as Cannes was unfolding, Mr. Dujardin, one of the best-paid stars of French cinema, was racked with anxiety about his chances on the day of the ceremony, he admitted in a recent interview. That may have accounted for his reaction to his win. A beaming Mr. Dujardin knelt at the foot of Robert De Niro, the jury president, performed a brief shuffle step, cursed in excitement, apologized and concluded his acceptance speech with, “Now I’m going to shut up, because apparently it works pretty well for me.”

“I didn’t want to go,” Mr. Dujardin recalled in the interview, sipping coffee at a hipster hangout in the bustling Ninth Arrondissement. Mr. Dujardin, in jeans and meticulous stubble, was outspoken and easygoing in person, willing to admit, “I felt relieved because people didn’t know me and had judged me only on my performance.”

The film, set for release in the United States on Nov. 25, was directed by Michel Hazanavicius and is intended to be shown in the 1:33 aspect ratio — that is, the format of silent movies, not the widescreen ratio prevalent today.

In a statement Mr. Hazanavicius said that he enjoyed working with Mr. Dujardin because his facial expressions and body language “fit into close-ups as well as into wide shots.”

“Few actors are good in both,” Mr. Hazanavicius added.

For the role Mr. Dujardin, who doesn’t speak English and had visited the United States only a few times before, lived in Hollywood for three months (the film was shot at the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank) wore a thin mustache to resemble Clark Gable and learned shuffle steps. He watched countless old silents to decipher their secrets, including many featuring, yes, Douglas Fairbanks. “I realized that dialogues were a burden,” he said. “What I could say with my body I didn’t need to express it by talking.”

Perhaps more surprising, he was also inspired by the Italian actor Vittorio Gassman’s manipulative playboy in “The Easy Life” (1962) and his caricatures in “I Mostri” (1963), a satire of Italian society. “In both movies Gassman completely fills the room,” Mr. Dujardin said. “And I needed to fill the room.”

But here Mr. Dujardin is often described as the incarnation of French humor, known for some of the funniest punch lines of contemporary cinema. With similar charm and reliance on body language he has been compared to the movie legend Jean-Paul Belmondo, with whom he performed in 2008 in “A Man and His Dog.”

Born in a Parisian suburb in 1972, he is the youngest of four brothers in a middle-class family. Mr. Dujardin studied drawing and worked as a locksmith “to make ends meet,” he said, then took up acting at 24, inventing spoofs and characters and performing at bars and cabarets. “I impersonated, poked fun and entertained myself,” he said. “I had the impression that I had done this all my life.”

His brother Marc, a lawyer who is also Mr. Dujardin’s occasional agent, remembered him as “a practical joker who amused even his own family.”

Marc Dujardin added, “We were caught by surprise when we learned that he was nominated for Cannes.”

In 1998 Jean Dujardin’s performance as one of the members of a parody boy-band called Nous C Nous (Us Is Us) met with modest success. But his regular turn in a daily six-minute TV spot called “Un Gars, Une Fille,” about a couple (including his real-life wife, Alexandra Lamy) confronted with the humdrum of married life, introduced his cheeky sense of humor and expressive face to millions of viewers.

Mr. Dujardin became known for clumsy, self-satisfied, egomaniacal losers. In the 2005 movie “Brice de Nice” (“The Brice Man”), which drew about four million French viewers to the theaters (making it the most-seen movie of the year here), Mr. Dujardin was an arrogant surfer who tells an attractive, rather underdressed young woman, “Do you know how physically intelligent you are?”

In 2006 he won considerable praise for his clumsy nonchalant agent in Mr. Hazanavicius’s “OSS 177,” a series of spoofs inspired by French spy novels. That earned him a best actor nomination at the Césars, the French film awards.

“Over the years,” Mr. Dujardin said, “my characters made me look better, even more interesting.” But he also admitted that it took years to stray from parts that fit his sense of humor and energy to more serious efforts. With rare exceptions French actors who make their names in comedy rarely switch genres.

When he did stretch, with characters like Octave, a cynical advertising designer in Jan Kounen’s “99 Francs” (2007) or the lonely alcoholic in Bertrand Blier’s “Clink of Ice” (2010), Mr. Dujardin drew good reviews but smaller audiences.

Mr. Blier said it was hard for Mr. Dujardin to play a type of character “he had never performed until now.” Mr. Kounen was kinder, saying that he had picked one of the rare actors in France “able to play an arrogant idiot who can inspire love.”

Mr. Dujardin views his career with an almost childlike detachment. “Each movie is a new movie,” he said, “and each movie is a new bet.”

By Maia De La Baume

While his 2010 feature “Black Swan” could have presaged a career transition into ballet, Darren Aronofsky is sticking with the cinema for the time being. This month, Mr. Aronofsky, whose films include “Requiem for a Dream” and “The Wrestler” (as well as a disturbing new series of anti-drug public service announcements) is temporarily trading his director’s chair for a different seat at the American Museum of Natural History, where he is heading the jury of its Margaret Mead Film Festival.

Now in its 35th year, this annual documentary series, which runs Thursday through Sunday, includes 36 films chosen from more than 1,000 submissions, as well as live music, art exhibitions and a listening party in the Hayden Planetarium dome hosted by WNYC’s Radiolab. On Sunday, Mr. Aronofsky and his jury will announce a winner from among seven directors vying for the Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award.

American Museum of Natural History
Darren Aronofsky, the director and jury chair of the Mead Film Festival.
For Mr. Aronofsky, his involvement in the Mead festival is an opportunity to immerse himself in a film competition he has long admired, and to reconnect with the documentary-based roots of his moviemaking career. He spoke recently to ArtsBeat about the festival, the interplay of fiction and non-fiction techniques in his films and, of course, reality television. These are excerpts from that conversation.

Q.
Of all the New York cultural institutions vying for your attention, why go with this one? Isn’t Lincoln Center going to be jealous?

A.
Actually, I mentioned it to Scott Foundas [of the Film Society of Lincoln Center] in passing. He was psyched. But it’s a totally different experience. Like so many New Yorkers, I’m a huge fan of the Museum of Natural History. When you go 5, 10 times a year, it just becomes a big part of you. Then when I heard that the Mead festival was looking to get a footprint again, I just thought it was a great idea. When I was a film student and applying with my early films to festivals, I just remember always being upset I never had something to submit. So now that it’s trying to come back, I think it’s a great idea and a great institution.

Q.
So the Mead festival was something you were aware of and were checking out before you broke into commercial filmmaking?

A.
Oh, yeah. Back in the day, when I was doing short films in the early ’90s, it wasn’t like it is now. Of course there was Sundance, but it wasn’t like every single town on the planet had a film festival. The Margaret Mead festival was really well-known and important, and then there was this renaissance of the film festival over the last 20 years and I think the Mead just lost some of its footing. But I don’t think anything’s really taken its place of what it offers, which is cutting-edge documentaries in the landscape of New York City — for me the center of the world [laughs], for many people the center of America.

Q.
How did documentary films end up influencing your fictional features?

A.
I first started studying film when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, with Ross McElwee and Alfred Guzzetti, and they are the guys who pioneered first-person documentary — probably what’s now turned into the entertainment that Michael Moore has turned into mainstream cinema. But it started off there, with “Sherman’s March” and other things. And the program that I was in was very documentary-based. My approach to “Pi,” my first film, came out of our first assignment: we took a 400-foot roll of Tri-X black-and-white film and had to make a portrait of one person. So I tried to turn that into a narrative film.

Q.
Do you still see the lessons of that education resonating in the kinds of movies you make now?

A.
Definitely. If you look at “The Wrestler” and “Black Swan,” I took these movie stars and stuck them into real worlds and tried to surround them with people from those real worlds. “Black Swan’s” maybe more stylized [laughs]. Reality television is an extension of documentary as well, and that’s taken over TV. From “Cops” to “Storage Wars,” it’s basically that. It’s hard to make narrative that rings really truthful. And now dramatic, independent films are really disappearing and dying, and most narrative films are these real high-end fantasy superhero films that don’t exist. There’s something amazing about seeing real people in real, dramatic situations. And that can be “I Used to Be Fat,” [laughs] which is a great, great, great show.

Q.
I’m sure MTV will be thrilled to have your endorsement.

A.
I’m a big fan of it. They have all these shows on MTV now, you can’t keep your eyes off them. It just all comes out of that.

Q.
What have you seen for this year’s Mead festival that you liked?

A.
It was a really good selection. There’s a great impressionistic black-and-white film called “Kinder,” which was about German boys, maybe 6- to 10-year-old kids. These kids totally forgot the camera was there and it caught some intense moments of childhood. There’s another one called “Memoirs of a Plague.” It’s incredibly beautiful and it’s all about locusts and people who are battling locusts. The filmmaker gives the locusts as much screen time as the people who are impacted by them. It’s a biological film in a sense — you’re seeing the science of these creatures, but in the great Margaret Mead tradition of ethnography, you see these people and the impact it has on them.

Q.
What else did you see that maybe didn’t focus as much on locusts?

A.
I liked another one called “Space Sailors.” The Soviet Union, at one point, wanted to send up cosmonauts from all its different satellite countries. They took one guy from Vietnam, one guy from Afghanistan, one guy from Cuba, and put them up all into space. This filmmaker went around and caught up with them, and saw how being part of that Cold War race to space impacted them. They all went to space and came back heroes, but then their lives took twists and turns, and some of them are just holding onto these memories and that’s all they have. Others just disappeared into nothing. Someone who clearly was the most famous person in their community, what happens to them? It drips away.

Q.
Your idea of what makes an accessible film is maybe a little different than other people’s, but do you think the films in the Mead festival would appeal to most regular moviegoers?

A.
I think the documentary films that make it to the theater have something very, very sexy about them, or catchy. It’s either very timely or very political or controversial. All of these are very well-made films that probably won’t get that type of distribution, but they’re just as engaging. They’re just harder to market and sell to an audience. I think people that do go to the theater every weekend, I think those people will really appreciate it. I’m not sure it’s for the summer action crowd. [laughs] But I don’t think the Mead’s aiming for them, either.

Q.
Coming out of an experience like this one with the Mead festival, are you ever tempted to make a documentary?

A.
There was a time, not too long ago, that I thought about subjects to do a documentary on. Right before I did “The Wrestler,” I was thinking about doing a documentary, and I realized, hey, I could stick an actor into that world and have fun with that. It’s a challenging thing, though, right now, because so much documentary is on TV. In many ways it’s as competitive as narrative feature filmmaking.

Q.
It would seem like a comedown from a fictional feature, where you’re able to decide how every element looks onscreen and how every performer acts, to a documentary where you wouldn’t necessarily be able to exercise as much control.

A.
It’s just a very different process. Instead of directing the performer, you’re directing the moment. If you’re at the camera and you see something happen, how you decide to frame it and what you decide to point the lens at, that’s what becomes the focus and how you tell a story and how you edit it together. I saw the George Harrison film [directed by Martin Scorsese] which was fantastic, but I’m not interested in the found-footage, talking-head type of documentary. My taste was always with the vérité. The Kardashian form of documentary.

Q.
Is that what it’s called officially?

A.
It’s amazing, huh, the fallout from that wedding? I have no idea who these people are, but that’s interesting that there’s backlash now — that they’re somehow anti-American, because they’re anti-family. Even Fox can beat them up.

Q.
Speaking of things I never thought I’d be discussing with you: It was announced recently that you’re going to be directing a video for Lou Reed and Metallica. Is there anything from your Mead festival experience that you can apply to that project?

A.
I think I’m just going to go with an open mind and see what these guys look like, their magic together, and then try and figure out where to put the camera. That’s what it is. There’s some incredible, beautiful imagery in the films in the Mead competition, and that was the joy of it. And those filmmakers were really present for their subject matter, and that’s the secret – be truthful to what’s happening in front of you.

(By Dave Itzkoff)

< Back
09 | 10 | 2011
VENEZIA 68
The Venezia 68 Jury, chaired by Darren Aronofsky and comprised of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, David Byrne, Todd Haynes, Mario Martone, Alba Rohrwacher, André Téchiné having viewed all twenty-three films in competition, has decided as follows:

GOLDEN LION for Best Film:
FAUST by Aleksander SOKUROV (Russia)

SILVER LION for Best Director to:
Shangjun CAI for the film REN SHAN REN HAI (PEOPLE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE SEA) (China – Hong Kong)

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE to:
TERRAFERMA by Emanuele CRIALESE (Italy)

COPPA VOLPI
for Best Actor:
Michael FASSBENDER
in the film SHAME by Steve MCQUEEN (Great Britain)

COPPA VOLPI
for Best Actress:
Deanie YIP
in the film TAO JIE (A SIMPLE LIFE) by Ann HUI (China – Hong Kong)

MARCELLO MASTROIANNI AWARD
for Best Young Actor or Actress to:
Shôta SOMETANI and Fumi NIKAIDÔ
in the film HIMIZU by Sion SONO (Japan)

OSELLA
for Best Cinematography to:
Robbie RYAN
for the film WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Andrea ARNOLD (Great Britain)

OSELLA
for Best Screenplay to:
Yorgos LANTHIMOS and Efthimis FILIPPOU
for the film ALPIS (ALPS) by Yorgos LANTHIMOS (Greece)

LION OF THE FUTURE – “LUIGI DE LAURENTIIS” VENICE AWARD FOR A DEBUT FILM
Lion of the Future – “Luigi De Laurentiis” Venice Award for a Debut Film Jury at the 68th Venice Film Festival, comprised of Carlo Mazzacurati (President), Aleksei Fedorchenko, Fred Roos, Charles Tesson, Serra Yilmaz has unanimously decided to award:

LÀ-BAS by Guido LOMBARDI (Italy)
VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM CRITICS’ WEEK
as well as a prize of 100,000 USD, donated by Filmauro di Aurelio e Luigi De Laurentiis to be divided equally between director and producer

Notable differences from earlier suggestions of the lineup were that Madonna’s “W.E.” would be playing out of competition, as would Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” and Mary Harron’s “The Moth Diaries” (which together reduced the female-helmed films in competition by two). “Wilde Salome,” directed by Al Pacino, was an inclusion in the out-of-competition lineup that was not noted earlier this week. The film stars Pacino alongside 2011’s big breakout Jessica Chastain (who after being the next big thing at Sundance with “Take Shelter” and Cannes with “The Tree of Life,” is also in Venice’s “Texas Killing Fields”).

Overall, the English-language presence at the festival is quite considerable. In addition to the four U.S. films in competition (“Ides of March,” “4:44 Last Day on Earth,” “Killer Joe,” “Dark Horse”), there’s Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (an Italian production), David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” (Canada-Germany), Roman Polanski’s “Carnage” (France-Germany-Spain-Poland), and U.K. entries “Wuthering Heights,” directed by Andrea Arnold, and “Shame,” directed by Steve McQueen.

As a result, the festival is remarkably star-studded. George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Madonna, Jude Law, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Al Pacino are just some of the celebrities with films heading to the Lido.

Full lineup listed below. More from indieWIRE as it comes in.

Members of Jury:

Director, producer and screenwriter Darren Aronofsky
Finnish film director
Visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila
British composer David Byrne, Ex-leader of the Talking Heads
Visual artist and filmmaker British David Byrne, leader of the Talking Heads American director Todd Haynes;
Cinema and theatre Director Mario Martone;
Actress Alba Rohrwacher; the
French film director and screenwriter André Téchiné

Competition
“The Ides of March,” George Clooney (U.S.) – Opening Night Film
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” Tomas Alfredson (Italy)
“Wuthering Heights,” Andrea Arnold (U.K.)
“Texas Killing Fields,” Ami Canaan Mann (U.S.)
“A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg (Germany, Canada)
“4:44 Last Day on Earth,” Abel Ferrara (U.S.)
“Killer Joe,” William Friedkin (U.S.)
“The Exchange,” Eran Kolirin (Israel, Germany)
“Alps,” Yorgos Lamthimos (Greece)
“Shame,” Steve McQueen (U.K.)
“Carnage,” Roman Polanski (France, Germany, Spain, Poland)
“Chicken With Plums,” Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud (France, Belgium, Germany)
“A Burning Hot Summer,” Philippe Garrel (France)
“A Simple Life,” Ann Hui (China, HK)
“Faust,” Aleksander Sokurov (Russia)
“Dark Horse,” Todd Solondz (U.S.)
“Himizu,” Sion Sono (Japan)
“Seediq Bale,” Wei Desheng (Taiwan)
“Quando la Notte,” Cristina Comencini (Italy)
“Terraferma,” Emanuele Crialese (Italy)
“L’Ultimo Terrestre,” Gipi (Italy)

Out of Competition
“Damsels in Distress,” Whit Stillman (U.S.) – Closing Night Film of Festival
“Vivan las Antipodas!” Victor Kossakovsky (Germany, Arg, Neth, Chile, Russia) – Out of Competition Opening Night Film
“La folie Almayer,” Chantal Akerman (Belgium, France)
“The Moth Diaries,” Mary Harron (Canada, Ireland)
“W.E.,” Madonna (U.K.)
“Il villaggio di cartone,” Ermanno Olmi (Italy)
“Wilde Salome,” Al Pacino (U.S.)
“Contagion,” Steven Soderbergh (U.S.)
“The Sorcerer and the White Snake,” Tony Ching Siu-tung (China, HK)
“Giochi d’estate,” Rolando Colla (Switzerland, Italy)
“La Desintegration,” Philippe Faucon (Belgium)
“Alois Nebel,” Tomas Lunak (Czech Rep., Germany)
“Eva,” Kike Maillo (Spain, France)
“Scossa,” Francesco Maselli, Carlo Lizzani, Ugo Gregoretti, Nino Russo (Italy)
“La Cle des chanps,” Claude Nuridsany, Marie Perennou (France)
“Tormented,” Takashi Shimizu (Japan)
“Marco Bellocchio, Venezia 2011,” Pietro Marcello (Italy)
“La Meditazione di Hayez,” Mario Martone (Italy)
“Tahrir 2011,” Tamer Ezzat, Ahmad Abdalla, Ayten Amin, Amr Salama (Egypt)
“The End,” Collective Abounabbara (Syria)
“Vanguard,” Collective Abounabbara (Syria)
“Evolution (Megaplex 3D),” Marco Brambilla (U.S.)