Venice International Film Festival, the story of the world’s oldest film festival this year at its 80th edition, told through historical and unpublished stories and testimonies. With the narrating voice of Carla Bruni, the film-documentary “The Lion’s Share » directed by Baptiste Etchegaray and Giuseppe Bucchi, produced by Canal Plus and Rai Com, with editorial supervision by Rai Cultura, retraces the crucial steps and significant moments of the Venice Film Festival that since its first edition in 1932 has been the mirror of its time and an integral part of Italian cultural history. The film-documentary in 3 parts starts with glamour (Glamorous Venice), a roundup of images dedicated to international stars, from Sophia Loren, Virna Lisi, Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot to Penelope Cruz, Monica Bellucci and Cate Blanchett who was awarded several times in Venice including with the Coppa Volpi in 2007 and 2022.
Part 2 is dedicated to the eventful era of the Film Festival, through tensed moments like the anguishing screening of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde », the first film to be screened at the festival in 1932, till the period of the Nouvelle Vague in the late 1950s, movement celebrated in Venice as nowhere else in the world, sequences of protests and scandals, such as the one sparked by the screening of Martin Scorsese’s “The Passion of the Christ” in 1988, etc. Part 3 explores the side of the Festival that is also a breeding ground for new talents, where Pedro Almodovar, Emir Kusturica, Wim Wenders, Akira Kurosawa and Jane Champion are among the artists revealed and consecrated in the years at the Lido. The voices of actors and great filmmakers, from Penelope Cruz to Tilda Swinton, from Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni to Luca Guadagnino perfectly match the black-and-white and colorful images of the Festival, the red carpets, the fabulous beach parties in luxurious hotels, the crowds of fans waiting for their favorite movie stars. Carla Bruni’s voice-over comments « One runs to the Festival to experience exacerbated emotions that last the time of a film: one loves, one hates, one bickers afterwards. In the end, nothing matters more than cinema».