Venice Film Festival resists the advance of Giorgia Meloni: ‘It must remain a space for reflection on art’

The Venice Film Festival is held on an island. It is a well-known fact. But it has also been a metaphor. It’s nearly an hour away from Venice by boat. But a much larger ocean separates the worldviews of the world’s oldest film festival and the Italian government, led by the far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and her party, the Brothers of Italy.

In 2023, the Venice Film Festival awarded two films on the odyssey of migrants to reach safety. But for the Meloni government, migrants should be sent back to their home countries or banned from reaching Italy’s ports. In 2021, the Golden Lion was awarded to Happening, a movie about a woman’s traumatic experience trying to get an abortion. While this year, Meloni worked to scrap any reference to safe abortion from the G-7 joint declaration. The festival shows movies about the trans community and refugees, films that fight against the discrimination of the marginalized, and vindicate feminism and anti-fascism. Issues that Meloni does not talk about, except to attack them.

With the far right in power in Italy, there was concern over what would happen to the artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera, whose contract was coming to an end after 13 years. The Meloni government had already replaced many of the leaders of Italy’s state TV network RAI, as well as the heads of the country’s main museums and the presenter of the Sanremo Music Festival, one of the most successful and also progressive.

Critics began to call Rai “TeleMeloni,” and claimed that the Meloni government was planning to install like-minded people in all the country’s senior artistic positions in order to combat the left’s alleged cultural hegemony. Local media hinted that Barbera’s fate was sealed. And yet, there he is, leading the 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday with the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Not only that: his contract has been renewed until 2026.

“All these concerns were due to the fact that when there is a new minister of culture, the first thing they usually do is renew the main leadership positions,” Barbera tells EL PAÍS over the phone. “This has indeed happened in many institutions and initiatives. In fact, the president of the Venice Biennale has changed.”

Indeed, the decision to appoint right-wing journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as president of the Venice Biennale increased the uncertainty over the artistic director’s future: it is the president of the Biennale who chooses the director of the Venice Film Festival.

Would Buttafuoco choose someone more like-minded? If so, who? Barbera didn’t even know Buttafuoco. Many Italians probably didn’t either, beyond his well-known conversion to Islam. But now that his contract has been renewed, Barbera has only thanks for him: “He has shown great intelligence and vision, regardless of his political affiliation. He is more interested in the smooth running of the job. There are no differences to my work: I have total autonomy and freedom. I know he has received a lot of pressure, but he has hidden it from me. And the truth is that I have always defined myself as a technician.”

Barbera may have tried to stay neutral, but he admits that there are “obvious” differences between the films he has chosen for the Venice Film Festival and the position of the Italian government: “It is impossible to hide or avoid.” Meloni has not attended the festival since she came to power. But she was referenced in the “We are all anti-Meloni” graffiti that appeared at last year’s event. She was also in a frame of the documentary March on Rome, by Mark Cousins, in 2022, which outraged the Brothers of Italy.

Meloni’s coalition partner, Matteo Salvini — the current minister of infrastructure and transport — did walk down the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival in 2023. He also attended in 2018, the same year he refused to see On My Skin, a film that denounced the death of Stefano Cucchi after a police beating. Salvini justified his absence from the audience by saying, “I don’t have time to go to movies.”

The decision to renew Barbera’s contract does not appear to have changed the artist director. This year, he is even upping the ante: on Thursday, September 5, the Venice Film Festival will show M: Son of the Century, Joe Wright’s adaptation of Antonio Scurati’s colossal biography about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In other words, a movie about the terrors of the fascist regime that Meloni and several representatives of her government continue to deny. What’s more, Scurati was recently cancelled by the RAI for criticizing Meloni’s failure to condemn that dark chapter in Italy’s history. He was meant to take part in a televised event, but was dropped from the program.

Perhaps Scurati will bring his message to the Venice Film Festival. “I announced my intention to select it [M: Son of the Century], as well as some documentaries [on Trump and Bolsonaro, among others]. There has never been any objection,” Barbera tells EL PAÍS. But the movie is already shaping up to cause great controversy.

The 21 films in the competition also include stories about lost teenagers and women fighting for their sexual freedom; organized crime and sadomasochistic relationships; exploited workers and wild parents. Georgian film director Dea Kulumbegashvili will present April, a film focused on a clinic that performs clandestine abortions in Georgia. And Kill the Jockey by Luis Ortega — “one of the most original voices in Argentine cinema,” according to Barbera — will also be shown.

And, of course, the festival will have the usual line-up of highly anticipated films (and now also series): The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature; Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga; Queer, a movie by Luca Guadagnino based on William S. Burroughs’ novel of the same name, starring Daniel Craig; Maria, a Pablo Larraín film with Angelina Jolie playing the opera soprano Maria Callas; and Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón’s small screen debut, starring Cate Blanchett. Hollywood stars like Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Julianne Moore and Jude Law will also be attending.

This is another one of Barbera’s hallmarks. Since he took over the festival, he has strengthened its relationship with Hollywood and the big streaming platforms. As a result, several films screened at the Venice Film Festival are later nominated for Oscars. Some critics accuse him of not giving enough space to auteur cinema, but the renewed visibility of the competition — which is a key event in global cinema — has worked in his favor, and may have contributed to his contract renewal.

“The festival is, and must remain, a space for meeting and reflection on art, not one for the political terrain,” he says. The island of the Venice Film Festival offers a different vision and a different Italy. Those who reject Meloni can climb aboard the festival’s vaporetto. It’s about to set sail again.

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