VENICE, Sept 8, (Agencies): A film based on the true story of Saartjie Baartman, a woman brought from what is now South Africa to Europe in the early 1800s and paraded as a freak of nature thanks to her appearance, has impressed audiences in Venice.
“Venus Noire,” directed by Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche, is one of 24 films in competition at the annual festival, and the warm reaction after press screenings suggests it is a favorite for awards at Saturday’s closing ceremony.
Yahima Torres plays Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus” who traveled to London in 1810 and Paris several years later in the hope of making a fortune with which to return to her homeland.
The movie, which recalls elements of the 1980 picture “The Elephant Man,” opens with Baartman playing the part of a tamed savage before a raucous London crowd which is at turns repulsed and fascinated by her figure and behavior.

Both slave to an avaricious master and willing participant in a lucrative trade, Baartman has some control over her destiny. But after moving to Paris her exposure becomes increasingly cruel and humiliating and she dies as a prostitute.
After her death, French scientists pored over her remains, preserving her brain and genitals for posterity and theorizing that she was closer to apes than European humans and therefore from an inferior race.
For Kechiche, the story of cruelty and intolerance has repercussions today.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the theories of the scientists of the past are echoed and have been echoed very recently, at the dawn of Fascism in Europe, for example,” Kechiche told reporters in Venice.
“I felt it a sort of moral duty to bear witness to these things that are happening up to today,” he added.
“At this particular point in time, I find myself very concerned, indeed anguished by the images that I see of the expulsions,” he said, an apparent reference to the recent repatriation of Roma to eastern Europe by France.
“I would like to say, unfortunately, the film is part of contemporary society. It’s very relevant to contemporary society.”

Remains
Kechiche was first drawn to making a movie about Baartman when South Africa asked France to return her remains, which had been on display at the Musee de l’Hommme in Paris until the mid-1970s.
They were returned to South Africa in 2002 and buried in the Cape Province where she was born.
“It was worth it” despite the scenes of degradation and nudity and having to gain more than 13 kilos (nearly 30 pounds), Torres told AFP of her first film role. “It’s a story you have to tell as a human being, as a woman.”
Like Kechiche, Torres stressed the film’s modern relevance. “We’re still experiencing racism... with people who think they are superior to others.”
The freak shows, and later appearances in bourgeois salons, focused on Baartman’s outsized buttocks, but a genital disorder that left her with abnormally large labia was an additional source of irrepressible curiosity in the scientific community.
A prominent French anatomist is allowed to examine her, but she refuses to expose her genitalia.

Few Italian films on immigration and xenophobia attempt to imagine immigrants’ lives prior to their arrival in Italy.
Former MTV VJ and documentary director Massimo Coppola does, with a heroine worthy of the Nouvelle Vague, in his uneven feature debut “Afraid of the Dark (Bruises).” His sensitive portrayal of an unlikely friendship, good eye for industrial wastelands (even beautiful countryside shots are spotted with electrical towers) and Joy Division soundtrack make some of the film’s social cliches easier to overlook.
“Afraid” is tailor-made for festivals, and its timely subject matter has become an arthouse staple of late. Domestic audiences for “Afraid” will be predominantly hip, young liberals who may find the Italian characters stereotypical but will doubtfully pose the same question of the foreigners.
Flighty, sexy, young Eva (Alexandra Pirici) lives alone and anonymously in Bucharest. When her factory closes down, she sets off for Foggia, a southern Italian city not exactly known for its beauty. Presumably, she’s going to join the sender of an old, sunny postcard we see in the very beginning. There, she meets Anna (Erica Fontana), a brooding young woman of the same age who works extra shifts in a Fiat factory to keep her poor family afloat.

With his dark comedy “A Sad Trumpet Ballad,” screened Tuesday at the Venice film festival, Alex de la Iglesia said his aim was to “exorcise” the enduring pain of the Spanish Civil War.
The love story in a zany circus setting is “an exorcism of anguish through humour, irony and comedy mixed with the noir genre so everything can have a proper burial,” said Iglesia, whose 1995 horror comedy “The Day of the Beast” won cult status in Spain.
“This is a love story, a crazy, ruthless, wild kind of love,” Iglesia told a news conference.
In the love triangle pitting two disfigured clowns against each other over the affections of a blonde acrobat, “the anxiety and the search for revenge lead to the destruction of the object of love,” Iglesia said.
“Our past is extremely sorrowful, involving all of us through our parents and grandparents,” he said. “Torture, pain and sorrow are always present in our hearts in one way or another.”
The 44-year-old director added: “The feeling I have about the past we share is a kind of hostility, aggressivity, the fact that we experienced violence, that we suffered this pain but aren’t responsible for it.”
Also Tuesday, US director and actor Vincent Gallo seemed more interested in a prize for eccentricity than the Mostra’s coveted Golden Lion as his “Promises Written in Water” about a young woman with a terminal illness screened at the Lido.