By Alireza Hatamvand
August 25, 1968. A warm summer night at the Venice Lido. The filmmakers, politicians, and members of the press are awaiting the 29th Venice Film Festival opening. In the coming days, films from some of the greats – Bernardo Bertolucci, Roberto Rossellini and John Cassavetes, amongst others – are going to be screened. Everything seems ready for a memorable festival. Yet, from outside the festival halls, voices rise… sharper and louder. The fire of student protests and leftist movements, sweeping across Europe, has reached Venice. Banners wave in the air: “Mostra fascista?” (“A fascist festival?”) and “Biennale morta” (“The Biennale is dead”).
Whispers ripple through the gathered journalists and filmmakers. Could the festival really be canceled? Tonight? Or maybe forever? And somehow, everyone wonders, how did it come to this?
Chapter 3: The Golden Lion Arrives (1946–1967)
The festival came to life in 1946 after World War II. This edition was brief and transitory, without jury and official prizes, in an agreement with The Cannes Film Festival which had been held for the first time earlier that year. But Venice soon recovered its drive, and 1947 was one of the most memorable years of the festival. That year, the festival achieved a record attendance of 90,000 spectators. The Soviet Union and newly established Popular Democracies, including Czechoslovakia, participated in an international film festival for the first time since the end of the war. Quite remarkably, Siréna, directed by the Czechoslovakian director Karel Stekly, received the Grand Prix of Venice.
In 1949, an important page in the history of the festival was turned, and the award for best film in the competition section was renamed the Golden Lion of St. Mark, in homage to one of the most recognisable symbols of the ancient Republic of Venice. Henri-Georges Clouseau won the first Golden Lion in history with Manon.
During the 1950s, Venice firmly established its role and influence on the global cinema stage, highlighting films from underrepresented nations. In 1951, Akira Kurosawa won the Golden Lion for his masterpiece Rashomon, while Kenji Mizoguchi won the Silver Lion twice in this decade, both of which helped Japanese cinema to be taken seriously on the international stage. Indian cinema also emerged with Satyajit Ray’s Golden Lion in 1957 for Aparajito.
The celebration of Italian neo-realism, which had begun in the late 1940s with the films of Rossellini and Visconti, continued in the 1950s and introduced figures such as Fellini, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Rossi, etc.
As the 1960s unfolded, the festival became bolder and more daring. It began to select more innovative films such as Alain Resnais’ complex Last Year in Marienbad, and Ivan’s Childhood, made by the young Andrei Tarkovsky. Additionally, it was a decade where the glory of The French New Wave and British independent cinema started to stabilise. The election of Luigi Chiarini as festival director in 1963 was also a considerable advantage for Venice. He redesigned the festival according to strict aesthetic criteria and evinced the maximum resistance to random political pressure and external interference. But the many social upheavals that spread across Europe in the 1960s began a new chapter in the story of The Venice Film Festival.
Chapter Four: Crisis and The End of Competition (1968–1979)
1968 represented not only a milestone in the history of The Venice Film Festival but also, more broadly, a turning point in contemporary world history. Decades of economic inequality, political repression and social crises, not to mention The Vietnam War, brought young people into the streets to protest. Students and intellectuals responded together in dozens of demonstrations across Europe and America, demanding social and political justice. The dissent was not just political and social, and would change the course of global culture, including the arts, forever.
The 29th Venice Film Festival of September 1968 was especially shaped by these protests. For the protesters, the festival signalled the ultimate in both bourgeois cultural participation, and traditional power and authority. As protests escalated, screenings of films were interrupted; there was increased security, and there was a significant police presence to prevent the potential for violence. Several filmmakers (Marco Bellocchio, Silvano Agosti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini) and critics supported the protests. No official prizes were given; this was only the beginning of an era of confusion for the festival.
From 1969 to 1972, the festival was non-competitive. Perhaps the most important event during this three-year period were the honorary Golden Lion awards presented to Charlie Chaplin and John Ford. There was more of a change of pace when Giacomo Gambetti took charge of the festival from 1974 to 1976. The festival was revamped as a non-competitive event, taking on the form of retrospectives and tributes, with a goal of building cultural and educational space for filmmakers.
The festival maintained an unstructured position from 1976 until 1979, with no competitive component during those years. The 1977 edition, “Cultural Dissent”, solely focused on Eastern European cinema, with clear political implications: The Cold War was still ongoing, and the East was still under the influence of The Soviet Union. Many artists had to contend with censorship and even stricter ideological control from their governing institutions. The West was attempting to amplify dissenting voices from the East. Furthermore, the artistic output of Eastern Europe was completely satisfying, as the works of directors like Andrzej Wajda, Miloš Forman and Jiří Menzel exhibited that year.
Due to continuing management-based and political issues, the festival was not held in 1978. Like most of the years of the 1970s, the festival was still non-competitive in 1979, but there were plans for the return of competition in 1980.
Chapter Five: Strength Through Structures (1980–Today)
Carlo Lizzani was another one of the directors of The Venice Film Festival to whom the festival will forever be indebted. In 1980, he revived the competitive section and brought back The Golden Lion, which had not been awarded for twelve years. That year, the prize was shared between Louis Malle for Atlantic City and John Cassavetes for Gloria. With the advice of the late, renowned Italian critic Enzo Ungari, Lizzani added the Officina section, dedicated to experimental cinema, and the Mezzogiorno–Mezzanotte section, which focused on crowd-pleasers, blockbusters, remakes, and eccentric films. Of course, these were not the only innovations of Venice in the 1980s. Critics’ Week was added in 1984, dedicated to the first and second films of directors. The Horizons section, also inaugurated in 1988, is dedicated to films that offered other stories, forms or styles. It is interesting to note that the festival directors did not turn their backs on the almost dark years of the 1970s – they hybridised the legacy of the 1970s with the legacy of the years before 1968 and offered a new template of The Venice Film Festival to the world, which in itself constituted a model for other festivals.
Venice never forgot its international mission and in all subsequent years it boldly screened films from countries with lesser-known cinemas, such as East Asia, and did not hesitate to hand its awards to these films. During the 1990s and 2000s, Zhang Yimou, Tran Anh Hung, Kim Ki-duk, Jia Zhangke and Ang Lee (twice) won The Golden Lion at The Venice Film Festival. The award was also given to celebrated Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi for The Circle and to Indian director Mira Nair for Monsoon Wedding. This is how Venice became known as the “Gateway to Asian Cinema” and undoubtedly, Asian cinema, and especially East Asian cinema, is forever indebted to Venice.
Over the years, The Venice Film Festival has steadily increased its commercial appeal. Each year, several big-budget, high-profile Hollywood films are screened for the first time in Venice. For example, films such as La La Land, The Shape Of Water and Roma had their first screenings in Venice. This trend of The Venice Film Festival’s tendency to premiere such films, and the fact that September is considered the beginning of the awards season, has made Venice a launching pad for the Oscars in recent years, and the media always looks to Venice in their Oscar predictions.
In 2025, it seems that Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia are the critics’ favourites so far. Of course, Guillermo del Toro and his adaptation of the immortal story of Frankenstein should be noted. That’s the excitement that Venice represents, a festival that is the oldest in the world, never brought down by any crisis and now continuing its glorious life, more alive than ever.
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