Giovanni Veronesi’s ‘Dio Ride’ To Close Venice Film Festival 

Dio ride, written and directed by Giovanni Veronesi (The King’s Musketeers), will close this year’s Venice Film Festival. 

The film will screen out of competition. The synopsis provided by the festival reads: “Set in the mid-1600s and loosely based on true events, the movie resonates strongly with the present time through a story that centers on freedom, the power of the truth, and the relationship between people and power, with its shadows and contradictions. With his profound humanity, the friar Frate Leopoldo will change the lives of the people he encounters.” 

Pierfrancesco Favino, Silvio Orlando, Alma Noce, Francesco Gheghi, Maurizio Lombardi, Paolo Rossi, and Carlo Cecchi star in the film. Fabrizio Donvito, Benedetto Habib, Marco Cohen, and Daniel Campos Pavoncelli produced for Indiana Production, and Massimiliano Orfei, Luisa Borella, and Davide Novelli for PiperFilm.

The script was written by Veronesi, Nicola Baldoni, Gianluca Bernardini, and Nicola Deorsola alongside Paolo Portone and Jean Jacques Llunga.

Discussing the title, Venice head Alberto Barbera said: “We will close on a high note thanks to Giovanni Veronesi and his magnificent cast, to whom we owe the successful blend of irony and lightness applied to a traditionally serious topic. It is a tone that belongs to the finest tradition of a certain Italian cinema, one that has been overlooked for far too long.”

Venice will open with Danny Boyle’s Rupert Murdoch biopic Ink. The film, starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy, will screen on September 2 in the Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido. 

Boyle directs the feature from a screenplay written by James Graham (Dear England), based on his Tony-nominated play. O’Connell stars as The Sun newspaper editor Larry Lamb with Pearce as Rupert Murdoch. Claire Foy is Jules Davies. 

Venice runs from September 2-12.