After a notably quieter 2023 edition – plagued as it was by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes – the Venice Film Festival will be back on form this summer, with everyone from Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie and Lady Gaga to Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Daniel Craig, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett and Monica Bellucci expected to pile onto water taxis and storm the red carpet, capturing front pages the world over. But, it’ll hardly be the first time the showcase has generated frenzied headlines – in fact, it’s almost as if something’s been in the water over the past decade, making the festival a magnet for industry drama. Ahead of its 81st iteration, we look back at the most talked-about Venice Film Festivals in recent memory.
5. 2014: A bizarre return to the spotlight The year that a Swedish film called A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence took home the Golden Lion , something even stranger happened: the famously provocative Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, who had stepped away from the industry after he was banned from Cannes following a 2011 press conference in which he jokingly declared himself a Nazi and expressed sympathy for Hitler, made a virtual appearance at Venice. Discussing his new, more-than-five-hour-long director’s cut of Nymphomaniac , which now contained more sex and an explicit abortion scene, he described himself as a “masochist” and insisted that the process of making the film had taught him nothing new about female sexuality.
“Have I learn.