Waiting for the Venice International Film Festival 2023

Actress Caterina Murino will open the 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 will be announced.

This year the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement have been awarded to the director Liliana Cavani, a versatile artist with a mindset which has always been nonconformist, free of ideological preconceptions, and decoupled from any type of brainwashing, and whose work reveals a brave gaze in facing even the most demanding taboos, and to the actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai, one of the most charismatic actors of contemporary cinema and one of the major actors of his generation, whose roles spanned a great variety of genres, but also have bridged television, popular culture, and art-cinema at different latitudes.

Comandante , directed by Edoardo De Angelis, starring Pierfrancesco Favino is the new opening film, a world premiere in Competition, of the 80th Venice International Film Festival. At the start of WWII, Salvatore Todaro commands the Italian Royal Navy submarine Cappellini. One dark night in October 1940, while navigating in the Atlantic, he comes upon an armed merchant ship sailing with lights out. He shoots his cannons at the ship and sinks it. At that moment, the Commander makes a decision that was destined to go down in history: he saves the 26 shipwrecked Belgians who otherwise would have drowned in the middle of the ocean and disembarks them at the nearest safe harbor, as prescribed by the law of the sea. To make room for them on board his submarine, he is forced to navigate on the surface of the water for three days, visible to the enemy forces and endangering his life and that of his men.

The Film Festival, now in its 80th year, paid homage to on the road movies with a poster by the Italian illustrator Lorenzo Mattotti. The opening sequence depicts a car speeding along a hilly scenic road, passing through colourful reliefs.
The parallelism is meant to be a 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‘, as the artist himself explained.

Photo credits: Andrea Avezzù