Venice Critics’ Week Unveils Lineup, Including ‘Homegrown’ Doc About Group of White Supremacist Donald Trump Supporters

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent U.S. journalist and filmmaker Michael Premo’s doc “Homegrown,” which follows a group of white supremacist Donald Trump supporters from the 2020 campaign trail all the way to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, is among titles set to world premiere at the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week.

Brooklyn-born Premo played a significant role in Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy’s hurricane response effort. The out-of-competition opener of the section dedicated to first works is French director Aude Léa Rapin’s “Planet B,” a cyberpunk sci-fi film starring Adèle Exarchopoulos (“Blue Is the Warmest Color”) about a group of political activists in 2039 France who, pursued by the state, vanish without a trace only to reawaken “trapped in an entirely unfamiliar world,” according to the provided synopsis. Besides “Homegrown,” the seven-title competition comprises Italian drama “Anywhere Anytime,” directed by Iran-born helmer Milad Tangshir.

The film riffs off Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves,” telling the tale of a young illegal immigrant living in Turin who starts working as a food-delivery rider until his bike gets stolen. Vietnamese director Dương Diệu Linh is competing with “Don’t Cry, Butterfly,” about a wedding venue staffer who discovers that her husband is betraying her on live TV; French-American filmmaker Alexandra Simpson is bowing Florida-set atmospheric drama “No Sleep Till”; and British-French filmmaker Jethro Massey is debuting with “Paul and Paulette Take a Bath,” a rom-com about a young American photographer and a French girl with a taste for the macabre who embark on a morbid road trip. Rounding off the competition are Austrian filmmaker Bernhard Wenger’s tragicomedy “Peacock,” starring German actor Albrecht Schuch (“All Quiet on the Western Front”), and Egyptian allegorical film “Perfumed With Mint” that marks the directorial debut of Emmy-winning Egyptian cinematographer Mahammed Hamdy (“The Square”).