Italy, Venice / founded in 1934
Takes place in September
The oldest film festival, founded on the initiative of Benito Mussolini, celebrated its 70th anniversary last year. Unfortunately, the position of Venice has weakened with age, and now this festival, although considered to be well-deserved, authoritative and so on, can hardly be compared to Cannes or Berlin. There are many reasons for this. First, the festival is held on the island of Lido with a limited number of hotels: it’s more difficult to get here, it is simply impossible to accommodate a large number of guests, and prices are constantly increasing. Secondly, here, in contrast to Cannes, with great difficulty is the renewal of infrastructure. Thirdly, the Venice Festival, which starts at the end of August, overlaps in the calendar with the Torrontes Festival, which attracts more and more journalists and professionals.
It is also important that Venice cannot compete with the leading international festivals in terms of the size of the film market. This is an absolutely logical outcome of the fact that in 2014 the Lido film market was organized for only the third time.
Be that as it may, the vast majority of filmmakers still can’t even dream of making it into the main competition of the Venice festival. Even getting into the less important Horizons program (feature and documentary films representing new trends in the development of cinema), the short-film competition or one of the parallel programs can already be considered a success.