Venice FF

Venice Film Festival – Venice, Italy #Venezia72

fredfilmradio, on

The oldest film festival in the world, and one of the most prestigious and beautiful film events of the year.

FRED Film Radio is joining the 72nd Venice Film Festival in Italy from the 2nd to the 12th of September 2015.

The 72nd Venice International Film Festival, organized by La Biennale di Venezia, will run on Venice Lido from 2nd to 12th September 2015, directed by Alberto Barbera.

The aim of the Festival is to raise awareness and promote the various aspects of international cinema in all its forms: as art, entertainment and as an industry, in a spirit of freedom and dialogue. The Festival also organizes retrospectives and tributes to major figures as a contribution towards a better understanding of the history of cinema.

Here is an introduction by the festival director Antonio Barbera, as features in the official website of the Venice Film Festival:

“Increasingly, the continent of cinema seems like a geographical configuration whose variable borders are undergoing continuous internal change, almost as though it were the result of daily seismic shifts. Today, its form could be compared to that of an archipelago composed of floating islands, some of which temporarily aggregate only to then drift apart once more. The fact is that, from a creative and a productive point of view, the geography of cinema inevitably reflects that of the world as we have seen it transform itself in recent years. There is no longer a center, much less a mono-duopoly (Hollywood cinema and European cinema, in other words), at whose margins other agglomerations of varying sizes proliferated and generated a basic equilibrium which sufficed to keep things stable. From this point of view, the 20th century is over, too. We are moving in a new territory, which has new rules and even a new form. Except that its form keeps changing, and the frame of reference is modifying much faster than we could have imagined only a few years ago.
The Venice International Film Festival tries to keep up with these changes, to follow them, photograph them and momentarily freeze the state of the art of international cinema. If society and the world have become liquid, exploring the many lands that have emerged after the great change means heading off to explore the new but also to rediscover the old presenting itself in a new guise. If an entire generation of filmmakers – the tip of the iceberg of a mass production which for thirty or forty years represented the core of reference for critics, cinephiles and attentive spectators – really is fading away because of old age, creative blocks or growing financial difficulty, it means that we are experiencing a historical moment that is still searching for a lodestar by which to orient itself, and the cultural industry is already no longer where our limited capability to perceive and analyze tells us it ought to be.
The Film Festival’s program is a freeze-frame that lets us observe – from a bit closer in and with opportune discernment – some of the elements and subjects that might become the lodestar of this new constellation. We who have selected and isolated them from their context are aware that some might become part of a consolidated and mainstream current, while others will be swept away by the inexorable tide before someone has the time and the means to help them grow and thrive.
To assume this commitment means to lay claim to the Festival’s role of research and stimulation; to counterbalance the market and its showcases without settling for being merely a platform to promote and validate the familiar. As Francesco Casetti shows in La galassia Lumière, cinema not only can survive those who long ago gave it up for lost, but under many aspects it is even expanding and reflowering. Thus, this year’s Festival hopes to witness the confirmation of cinema’s persistence, right down into the profound upheavals that are transforming it.”

Click here to visit the official website of the 72nd Venice Film Festival