Oscar winners Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron play mother and daughter in "The Burning Plain", an intense news report of love and treachery and the directorial debut by acclaimed Mexican film writer Guillermo Arriaga.
The film is the get-go of five US entries to appear in the main competition at the Venice film festival, and was warmly applauded by critics and journalists on Friday at a press screening ahead of its red carpet world premiere.
Arriaga is best known for his scripts that let in well received dramas "Amores perros", "21 Grams" and "Babel", for which he was nominative for an Academy Award.
Based on his description of his number 1 outing slow the photographic camera, it would appear Arriaga will be directing again.
"I enjoyed every single instant of it," he told reporters, speech production in English.
"I can tell you that directing was maybe the happiest moment of my professional life. Just arriving on set I had a smile. . . and it hasn't vanished until now."
The converging strands and time jumps in "The Burning Plain", which Arriaga too wrote, ar his trademarks.
"We never in real life tell stories in a linear elbow room," Arriaga aforesaid. "We recount it always in a decomposed way.
"I think that cinema is a very young medium and it's beginning to find its own language and among these languages is the deconstruction of time."
Producer Walter Parkes said Arriaga had "changed the way move picture stories are told."
As well as time, the film explores the elements � each storyline represents either worldly concern, air, fire or water, and the landscape jumps from arid desert and brutal temperateness to gibbosity seas and rain-filled coastal skies.
OBSESSED WITH DEATH
It too deals with death.
"I have been taken up with the weight of death o'er the living ones," aforementioned the 50-year-old director.
"My individuality is constructed by the people that I passion, by the people that surround me. Every time one dies, part of my identity is broken and lost. I am obsessed at how that loss of someone that I lovemaking affects my own identity."
Theron, who plays the emotionally-scarred Sylvia in "The Burning Plain", was also a producer on the film as she was on "Monster" for which she won a best actress Oscar.
"I'm mesmerised by how this industry survives, how it struggles," the 33-year-old said.
"I don't have to do it every time, but it's something that I truly enjoy when I feel I meet people where we're like-minded and we walk the same road and state the same story."
Basinger, 54, was not at the press group discussion in Venice, but Theron said her age brought a new dimension to her acting.
"There's a strength," said Theron. "Especially, I think now in her age more than when she was working in her 30s, there's a strength with this remnant vulnerability from her 20s that's just unbelievably beautiful to watch."
Other US films in rival in Venice include "Rachel Getting Married", directed by Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme and starring Anne Hathaway and Debra Winger, and "The Wrestler" with Mickey Rourke and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Kathryn Bigelow as well presents Iraq war dramatic event "The Hurt Locker".
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