The Venice Film Festival, known primarily for its Euro-heavy narrative competition slate, is fast becoming a coveted launching point for the year’s best nonfiction filmmaking. This year alone sees the world premieres of the second part of Julia Loktev’s massive, award-winning “My Undesirable Friends,” Luca Guadagnino’s seven-hour Bertolucci documentary “Joie de Vivre,” and Alex Gibney’s four-hour “Musk” portrait. One buzzed-about documentary premiering out of Venice, however, is just 90 minutes.
That would be “The Truffle Hunters” directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s new documentary “Burgundy,” which follows the lives (and loves) of a family of winemakers in France’s legendary wine country. Observational, rather than constructed with talking head interviews, “Burgundy” spans a coming-of-age romance, a mogul’s contemplations on the next steps in his legacy, and even a critic’s reflections on his own tastes into one delightful feature. IndieWire debuts an exclusive clip below ahead of its Venice festival premiere.
Dweck and Kershaw earned great acclaim (and a place on the 2021 Best Documentary Feature Oscar shortlist) for their Guadagnino-executive-produced “Truffle Hunters,” set in Northern Italy. Here’s their director’s statement about “Burgundy”: We started ‘Burgundy’ the way we start all our films: looking for people still tethered to their dirt. Places where the past isn’t history, but the rituals of daily life. Then we stayed. Long enough to understand that pleasure in Bourgogne is not a hobby but a discipline, practiced daily, with the gravity other people reserve for religion.
“Stay that long and you stop observing. We began dreaming stories onto the lives we were following, until the film became what it is: a portrait of a magical community, rendered through drunken eyes. We want you to luxuriate. To delight in the pleasures of this land and lose the afternoon. And then, somewhere around the third glass, to notice that a life built on pleasure is not a simple life, that these people are as tangled as the rest of us, only afloat on something exquisite.”
And finally, more on the film from Venice’s synopsis: “In ‘Burgundy,’ the world’s most celebrated wines are only part of the story. Behind every bottle lies a world shaped by ritual and inheritance, and by those striving to preserve or transform it. Through the eyes of a new generation searching for its place, Burgundy opens the doors to a world rarely seen from within, and then imagines its way further inside. An aspiring sommelière earning her craft under one of the greats meets a young vineyard worker who longs to become part of a world he has only admired from afar. Around them, an aristocratic winemaker defines his legacy, a legendary maître d’hôtel seeks his heir, and a reverent wine critic pursues the sublime. Devotion, desire and heritage intertwine in a portrait where the observed and the invented become inseparable.”
“Burgundy” premieres at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, September 3. Charades is handling world sales. It’s seeking U.S. distribution.
