The Venice Film Festival or Venice International Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Venice, Italy. It is the world's oldest film festival and one of the "Big Five" International film festivals worldwide, which include the Big Three European Film Festivals, alongside the Toronto Film Festival in Canada and the Sundance Film Festival in the United States.These festivals are internationally renowned for giving creators the artistic freedom to express themselves through film. In 1951, FIAPF formally accredited the festival.
The Venice Biennale is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of its kind. The main exhibition held in Castello, in the halls of the Arsenale and Biennale Gardens, alternates between art and architecture. The other events hosted by the Foundation—spanning theatre, music, and dance—are held annually in various parts of Venice, whereas the Venice Film Festival takes place at the Lido.
Claire Denis is a French film director and screenwriter. Her feature film Beau Travail (1999) has been called one of the greatest films of the 1990s and of all time. Other acclaimed works include Trouble Every Day (2001), 35 Shots of Rum (2008), White Material (2009), High Life (2018) and Both Sides of the Blade (2022), the last of which won her the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival. For her film Stars at Noon (2022), Denis competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. She won the Grand Prix, sharing the award with Lukas Dhont's film Close.
Humbert Jean René Balsan was a French film producer and chairman of the European Film Academy. He was known for securing financing and distribution for diverse and often challenging films.
Michel Subor was a French actor who gained initial fame with the starring role in Jean-Luc Godard's second feature, Le petit soldat (1960), but the French government banned it until 1963 because of its political content, touching on terrorism during the undeclared Algerian War. He acted in a couple of American films in the late 1960s including the role of Claude Jade's husband in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz. In 1999, he once again played Forestier in Beau Travail, a highly praised variation of Billy Budd, directed by Claire Denis. He continued to work with her.
Grégoire Colin is a French actor.
Stuart Ashton Staples is an English musician best known as the lead singer of indie band Tindersticks, in which he also plays guitar. Staples is noted for his recognisable crooning vocal style and a distinctively low, nasal voice.
Agnès Godard is a French cinematographer. She is most famous for her long-running collaboration with filmmaker Claire Denis. For her work, she has won a César Award.
The Volpi Cup for Best Actress is an award presented by the Venice Film Festival. It is given by the festival jury in honor of an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance from the films in the competition slate. It is named in honor of Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, the founder of the festival. The 1st ceremony was held in 1932, when Helen Hayes received the Volpi Cup for the title role in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931)—this was the only time that the award was chosen by public voting. From 1942 to 1945, the festival was suspended because of World War II. The student protests in May 1968 opened a period of institutional changes, with no prizes were awarded from 1969 to 1979.
The 65th annual Venice International Film Festival, held in Venice, Italy, was opened on 27 August 2008 by Burn After Reading, and closed on 6 September 2008. International competition jury, led by Wim Wenders, awarded Golden Lion to The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky.
The 61st annual Venice International Film Festival was the 2004 edition of the Venice International Film Festival, held between 1 and 11 September 2004. The festival opened with Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, and closed with Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy. The Golden Lion was awarded to Vera Drake, directed by Mike Leigh.
35 Shots of Rum is a 2008 drama film directed by Claire Denis. It stars Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, and Grégoire Colin. It tells the story of a father-daughter relationship complicated by the arrival of an attractive young man. The film had its world premiere out of competition at the 65th Venice International Film Festival on 29 August 2008. It was released in France on 18 February 2009, and in Germany on 5 March 2009.
Christian Petzold is a German film director and screenwriter. Petzold is part of the 21st century Berlin School film movement. His films have received international recognition and acclaim. He is known for his frequent collaborations with actresses Nina Hoss and Paula Beer. Petzold won the Silver Bear for Best Director for his film Barbara (2012) at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival.
Fondazione Prada, co-chaired by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli since 1995, is an institution dedicated to contemporary art and culture. From 1993 to 2010, the Fondazione has organised 24 solo shows at its exhibition spaces in Milan, conceived as dialogues with acclaimed contemporary artists. In 2015, the Fondazione Prada opened a new, permanent facility in Milan.
Martine Beugnet is a French film theorist, and a Professor in Visual Studies at the Paris Diderot University. She has written primarily on corporeality and sensation in avant-garde and narrative cinema, and has had her work published in several film journals. She wrote her PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh in 1999, on themes of sexuality and bodies in recent French cinema, citing filmmakers such as Claire Denis, Bertrand Blier, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Laetitia Masson, and Leos Carax. She later wrote an entire monograph on the work of Claire Denis, where she invoked the film theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. In 2005, she published a book on cinematic treatments of Marcel Proust, written in collaboration with Marion Schmid. Two years later, she wrote a book titled Cinema and Sensation, where she further explored themes she had written about in her PhD thesis, again invoking Deleuze.
Neo-Baroque film is a type of film theory that used in film studies to describe certain films, television shows and Hollywood blockbusters characterised by the excessively ornate, carnivalesque fragmentation of the film frame and/or narrative, sometimes to the point of spatial and/or narrative incoherence.
The 77th annual Venice International Film Festival was held from 2 to 12 September 2020, albeit in a "more restrained format" due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amina Zoubir is a contemporary artist, filmmaker and performer from Algiers, Algeria. She is known as a feminist performer through video-actions entitled Take your place, which she directed in 2012 during the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence, aiming to question gender issues and conditions of women in Algerian society. She has worked with different art mediums such as sculpture, drawing, installation art, performance and video art. Her work relates to notions of body language in specific spaces of North Africa territories.
