Venice Watch: Mcdormand Hails Female Stories

VENICE, Italy (AP) — The Venice Film Festival is bringing 11 days of red carpet premieres, innovative movies and Hollywood glamour to the Italian city. The Academy Award-winning actress is in Venice with the four-part HBO miniseries, in which she plays an acerbic schoolteacher in a small Maine town full of troubled souls. The 57-year-old, who won an Oscar for "Fargo," received a career prize from the Italian festival on Monday before a red-carpet screening of the show. Skarsgard said he agreed the moment von Trier called him and said "Stellan, my next film will be a porno film and I would like you to play the male lead." Producer Louise Vesth announced that von Trier's next project will be an English-language TV series entitled "The House That Jack Built." "Nymphomaniac" — whose director's cut is screening in Venice — stars Charlotte Gainsbourg as a sexually insatiable woman with a taste for S&M who tells her eventful life story to Skarsgard's quiet intellectual. Arab-Israeli director Suha Arraf submitted her drama about three Palestinian sisters living in their ancestral house in Ramallah to the Venice Film Festival as a Palestinian entry.