Venice Film Festival Closes with Ali Asgari's 'A Bit of Light' and Marco Bechis's 'Ritorno a Buenos Aires'

Key facts

• The 83rd Venice Film Festival's final days screened Ali Asgari's 'A Bit of Light' and Marco Bechis's 'Ritorno a Buenos Aires'.
• 'A Bit of Light' is Ali Asgari's sixth feature and first in main competition, after Orizzonti and Cannes.
• The film follows Arash, a doctor detained and whose practice was closed for treating wounded protesters, who decides to die.
• It was co-written with Shadmehr Rastin, produced by Milad Khosravi with Swiss, Italian, Canadian and Turkish partners.
• Exteriors were shot in Tehran; the crew crossed by road to Turkey over three days for interiors.
• Misagh Zareh, from Mohammad Rasoulof's 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig', stars in 'A Bit of Light'.
• 'Ritorno a Buenos Aires' is set in 2008 and follows Mariano Guerra, an Italian doctor kidnapped, tortured and enslaved under the dictatorship, returning thirty years later to testify.
• Marco Bechis was himself abducted in 1977 and held at Club Atlético; the film revisits his 1999 'Garage Olimpo'.
• The Italian-Brazilian co-production was shot in Porto Alegre and Turin because Argentina, under an ultraliberal technocrat Bechis refuses to name, lacks conditions to film.
• Adriano Giannini stars in 'Ritorno a Buenos Aires', which critics call the best of five Italian competition titles in a weak crop.