Five talking points from the 2024 Venice Film Festival

The Venice Film Festival wrapped on Saturday (September 7) night with key prizes for Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April and Maura Delpero’sVermiglio, while Nicole Kidman won best actress for Babygirl and Vincent Lindon best actor for The Quiet Son.

Screen rounds up key talking points from the festival.

Stars arrive in force…

Last year, the strikes kept the stars away. This year, Venice was brimming with big names, among them George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie, Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore and Jude Law. It must have been a scheduling nightmare for the organisers (apparently Edward Berger’s Conclave starring Ralph Fiennes was invited but it was difficult to find the right spot for it). As usual, the first weekend was the busiest with large crowds on the first Sunday for the Wolfs red carpet with Clooney and Pitt.

The star turnout confirmed Venice’s place at the top echelons of the festival calendar, while wins for The Room Next Door and for Nicole Kidman cemented its role as a major launchpad for awards season. It wasn’t so long ago that Venice was something of a festival backwater, but it has grown in stature since artistic director Alberto Barbera began his second term in 2012.

…but avoid the press

That said, most of the stars were only in town for a short time. They walked the red carpet, did a press conference and then shipped out without taking part in press junkets or giving interviews. It prompted a group of 50 freelance journalists to sign a statement criticising the lack of press access to major talent, stating that “cinema journalism is at risk of extinction”. The issue of decreasing press access to talent at festivals has been bubbling away for some time.

Of course, some films come without distribution attached, so want to hold off granting star interviews until they have a local distributor in place who can organise promotional events around release time. It also costs a lot to organise a junket in a city like Venice. But it also costs a lot for each of the accredited 2,900 media professional to attend Venice, and some PRs worry they will stay away in future if they can’t secure interviews to make the trip worthwhile.

More of a market?

Venice’s market, the Venice Production Bridge (VPB), doesn’t have the scale of the Cannes Marché or the European Film Market; the city is too expensive for companies to send big delegations. But it still manages to attract some highly influential industry executives. Most sales companies were represented, as were key buyers, streamers, festivals and institutions. VPB said 3,135 industry delegates were registered this year, up 8% compared to 2023. The festival has become a regular meeting point for European institutions and trade organisations, acting as a kick-off for the autumn after the summer break.

The Italian government used Venice to announce details of its revised tax break for international films. Deal news was relatively thin on the ground though – some films, like Apple TV+’s Wolfs, came with distribution in place, while others use Venice as a launchpad for future deals.

Among high-profile acquisitions announced at Venice, Pablo Larrain’s Maria sold widely including to Netflix for the US and Studiocanal for the UK/Ireland, while while A24 snapped up US rights to Luca Guadagnino’s Queer and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Elsewhere, Utopia acquired US rights to Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements after its Venice premiere. German director Andres Veiel’s documentary Riefenstahl notched up sales to key territories, while Metrograph Pictures took North American rights for Neo Sora’s surveillance drama Happyend.

Working up a sweat

You were unlikely to elicit much sympathy by complaining about the heat in Venice to colleagues, family and friends who were not there. But, for those who attended, Venice was uncomfortably hot and humid this year. Look closely at the pictures of stars attending premieres and most are ‘glowing’ with a sheen of sweat on their brows. “Oh my God, it’s so hot, I’m so hot!” said Nicole Kidman as she entered the Sala Grande for the premiere of Babygirl.

Top talent reportedly told their publicists they were dreading the red carpet because of the heat. Angelina Jolie braved her Maria premiere in a faux fur stole. The open spaces outside the Palazzo del Casinò and Palazzo del Cinema were like cauldrons; by the end of each long hot day, anyone working in Venice was looking dishevelled and sweaty. Even at night, there was no relief from the sultry humidity; the most popular eating and drinking spots were always inside air-conditioned rooms, and not on terraces or balconies overlooking the sea. The high temperatures made the passionate call in Venice by Pedro Almodóvar for greater action on climate change even more pertinent.

Politics on the Lido

Venice did programme several films about the conflicts of our time – the Israel-Hamas war and the Russia-Ukraine war – but it largely avoided the protests that have affected other festivals this year. During Venice’s awards ceremony on Saturday night, several awardees mentioned the Israeli offensive in Gaza in their speeches, including Sarah Friedland, winner of the debut film award and Horizons best director for Familiar Touch, who described Israel’s actions as genocide.

Proving how difficult it is for festival execs to anticipate where or how trouble might flare up, a key running story during Venice this year concerned the fate of Georgian film The Antique, by Rusudan Glurjidze, which had its Giornate degli Autori screening suspended following a dispute between its Georgian, Russian, Croatian and Cypriot producers before it was permitted to air at the very last minute.

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