‘Athena’ Enrapts Crowd At World Premiere – Venice

deadline.com:

Romain Gavras’ immersive modern tragedy Athena just had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, receiving a 4 1/2-minute standing ovation in the process.The French film had people applauding and whooping from the start of the end credits before the crowd stood for the ovation.The kinetic story begins just after the death of a young boy, in unexplained circumstances, throwing his three brothers and the whole of the eponymous Athena housing project outside Paris into chaos.Venice Film Festival Photo Gallery: Chalamet, Blanchett, Iñárritu & MoreIn a star-making turn, Dali Benssalah plays Abdel, a soldier in the French army who is called back from the frontline after the death of his youngest brother following an alleged police altercation, and finds his family torn apart.

Caught between his younger brother Karim’s (Sami Slimane) desire for revenge and the criminal dealings of his older brother Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), he struggles to calm the rising tensions.

As the situation escalates, their community, Athena, is transformed into a fortress under siege, becoming a scene of tragedy for both the family and beyond.In his review, Deadline’s Todd McCarthy wrote that Athena “grabs you by the throat and barely allows you a moment for a gasp of air” and that its “long, seamless opening shot transitions from a single building to all over the neighborhood in a startling visual manifestation… Spielberg’s West Side Story looks like child’s play compared to the way this was shot on the streets.”Venice Film Festival: Memorable Moments 1945-1984 GalleryGavras recently told Deadline the film was “imagined as a Greek tragedy, and ultimately the tragedy is a kind of inexorable advance towards chaos.” The filmmaker said the script