Venice Film Festival 2015: five Oscar contenders

The 72nd Venice Film Festival, which kicks off today in the picturesque City of Bridges, has developed something of a hit-making reputation in recent years. In 2013, it launched Gravity on a course towards seven Academy Awards, and last year’s opener, the midlife-crisis comedy Birdman, soared on to win four Oscars including best picture.

The oldest surviving film festival has lost some ground in recent years to the near-simultaneous Toronto Film Festival, says The Guardian. Toronto has "become a powerhouse of international dealmaking and a magnet for world-premiere film launches", but the signs are there that Venice is "regaining its poise and making new headway in the frantically competitive" film universe.

For the next 11 days on the Lido, red carpets will be unfurled, cameras will flash, and a new crop of films will premiere. Here are five highlights and possible Oscar contenders from this year's festival:

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Everest

The festival opens with Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur’s survival epic starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robin Wright, Josh Brolin, Keira Knightley, Emily Watson and Jason Clarke. Based on real events surrounding an ill-fated 1996 climbing expedition, the drama follows two groups of mountain climbers and their desperate struggle to stay alive during a snowstorm on top of the world's highest mountain peak.

The Danish Girl

Already creating an Oscars buzz, the new film from Tom Hooper (2011 Best Director for The King's Speech) stars Eddie Redmayne (2014 Best Actor for The Theory of Everything) alongside Alicia Vikander, Matthias Schoenaerts and Ben Whishaw. Based on David Ebershoff's award-winning novel about the first person to undergo gender reassignment surgery, the film has been getting attention this week as an early trailer reveals Redmayne's physical transformation for the role.

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Beasts of No Nation

Cary Fukunaga's labour-of-love project finally got the green light after he directed the hit first season of True Detective. Starring Idris Elba, and a cast of mostly unknowns, Beasts is based on the novel by Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala, and tells the story of Agu, a child soldier under the spell of charismatic African warlord (Elba) after his parents are murdered in a civil war. The film sparked a distribution bidding war eventually won by Netflix. It's inclusion in the festival is not without controversy, as the streaming giant alarmed distributors and cinema owners by announcing it would release the film simultaneously on-demand and in cinemas in October.

Anomalisa

This Kickstarter-funded stop-motion animation is written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman, the writer behind the acclaimed Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. It follows a motivational speaker (voiced by David Thewlis) who is experiencing a typical Kauffman-like bout of existential crisis until he meets Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Black Mass

Johnny Depp is almost unrecognisable in Scott Cooper's biopic about Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, who became an FBI informant and used this status to eliminate his rivals from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The film, co-written by British playwright Jez Butterworth and co-staring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Joel Edgerton and Peter Sarsgaard gets it's world premiere at the festival but is not in competition for the festival's top prize, the Golden Lion.