The Venice International Film Festival, directed by Alberto Barbera, will be held from Aug. 30 to Sept. 09 at the Lido de Venezia, the barrier island in the Venetian Lagoon in the north of Italy. The aim of the Festival is to raise awareness and promote international cinema in all its forms as art, entertainment and as an industry, in a spirit of freedom and dialogue. The Festival also organises retrospectives and tributes to major figures as a contribution towards a better understanding of the history of cinema.

Actress Caterina Murino will be the godmother of the Festival. She will open the 80th Venice Film Festival on the evening of Wednesday 30 August 2023, on the stage of Sala Grande (Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido) for the inauguration ceremony, and will host the closing ceremony on Saturday 9 September, when the winners of the Lions and other official prizes of the 80th Venice Film Festival will be announced.

This year’s jury of the 80th annual Venice Film Festival is chaired by American director, screenwriter and producer Damien Chazelle, who was named as the international jury president. Chazelle has opened the Venice International Film Festival with his films on two occasions, in 2016 with La La Land, that received 14 Academy Awards nominations, winning six including Best Director, and in 2018 with First Man, that received 4 Academy Awards nominations, and won one. Other jury members include Saleh Bakri, Palestinian film and theater actor, Jane Campion, new Zealander director, screenwriter and producer, Mia Hansen-Løve, French director and screenwriter, Gabriele Mainetti, Italian director, actor, composer and producer, Martin McDonagh, Irish screenwriter and director, Santiago Mitre, Argentinian screenwriter and director, Laura Poitras, American director and journalist, Shu Qi, Chinese actress.

Comandante, directed by Edoardo De Angelis, starring Pierfrancesco Favino, is the new opening film, a world premiere in Competition. Challengers, the movie by Luca Guadagnino that had previously been announced, will not participate at the Festival following a decision made by the production. Changes due to the Sag-Aftra strike Comandante will be presented as a world premiere on Wednesday, August 30, 2023 in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema (Lido di Venezia), during the Opening Ceremony of the 80th Venice International Film Festival.

Among the films scheduled in competition at the 2023 Venice Film Festival there Priscilla by Sofia Coppola, Maestro by Bradley Cooper, Origin by Ava Duvernay, Memory by Michelle Franco, Ferrari by Michael Mann, El Conde di Pablo Larraín, and Dogman di Luc Besson. Coup de Chance by Woody Allen and The Palace by Roman Polanski are the the most anticipated movies out of competition.

The the 90-year-old director from Modena Liliana Cavani and the Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai will each receive the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement, the most prestigious honors given during the Venice Film Festival. With regard to the award to Liliana Cavani, Festival director Alberto Barbera declared: “One of the most emblematic protagonists of the New Italian Cinema of the 1960s, whose work has spanned over sixty years of show business history, Liliana Cavani is a versatile artist who frequents television, theatre, and opera with the same unconventional spirit and intellectual ferment that have made her movies famous." Commenting on Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s award, Barbera said: “Tony Leung is a charismatic performer in the course of an exceptional transnational career which has evolved paralleling the expansion of global film circulation. Not only have Tony Leung’s roles spanned a great variety of genres, but also have bridged television, popular culture, and art-cinema at different latitudes.

Italian illustrator and artist Lorenzo Mattotti is, for the sixth consecutive year, the author of the image for the official poster, and for the fifth year, of the opening sequence for the Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia. The image chosen for the poster this year “is inspired by the tradition of on the road movies, explains Lorenzo Mattotti, and in this way seeks to express feelings of freedom, adventure, the discovery of new territories. I played with the graphics to represent new worlds that can be explored through Cinema. We are convinced that there is a great future for Cinema that looks forward and ventures down new paths. Furthermore, the Venice International Film Festival is celebrating its 80th edition this year and we wanted to commemorate that in the number that appears on the license plate of an imagined car. Naturally, many are the films that can be evoked by this image, such as Il sorpasso, Easy Rider or Thelma and Louise. May each of us find our own on the road movie. This is our wish for Cinema, may it go far and sprint towards the future. A future of exploration, in search of new frontiers: a colourful luminous Cinema”.

For more information visit www.labiennale.org.