What to expect from the first film festival of the covid era

By N.B.

FILM FESTIVALS are where many of the industry’s most commercially and critically successful films have their premiere. Last year, Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood” and Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” (the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture) made their red-carpet debuts at Cannes. “Joker” and “Marriage Story” were introduced at Venice.

This year, thanks to the coronavirus, things are different. The Cannes Film Festival, due to be held in May, was postponed and then cancelled; every other important festival since March has either been called off or reconfigured as an online-only event. Compared with some of the other effects of covid-19, these cancellations may seem about as significant as an Adam Sandler comedy. But it is almost impossible to count the films which would otherwise have been screened, the people who would have travelled to see them, and the production and distribution contracts which would have been signed in hotel bars around the globe. It will be a huge relief to the film industry that one of the most venerable and prestigious events of all—the Venice Film Festival—is to go ahead from September 2nd.

In July the organisers announced that they would “present certain changes” to make this possible. The Official Selection line-up has been slashed from about 80 titles to about 55; the Virtual Reality section is online, rather than on the small island of Lazzaretto Vecchio (the site of Venice’s medieval plague hospital, ironically); the Venice Classics section has been folded into a separate festival in Bologna; the experimental Sconfini section has been shelved; and two new outdoor venues have been built. Masks are to be worn, temperatures checked and at least half of the seats in every auditorium must be left empty.

Yet in many respects, the festival will be much the same glamorous celebration of the silver screen as always. Tilda Swinton, a Scottish actor, will receive a lifetime achievement award. Cate Blanchett, an Australian actor (pictured at last year’s event), will be president of the competition jury. According to Alberto Barbera, the festival’s artistic director, Venice will deliver “a message of concrete optimism for the entire world of cinema which has suffered greatly from this crisis”.

That does not mean that the movie business is returning to normal. As exciting as the prospect of the Venice’s annual “Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica” may be, it has some obvious advantages over its competitors when it comes to adjusting to the pandemic. At Cannes, for instance, the streets teem with visitors who wait for hours at a time in the hope of spotting their favourite star. Journalists stand in snaking queues for packed screenings, and are funnelled into busy corridors and staircases afterwards. Once they have sweated over their reviews in crowded press rooms, squatting wherever they can find floor space, they race to restaurants and bars where they sit elbow to elbow. Love it or hate it, the crush is a part of what gives Cannes its unique buzz. There is no way it could institute any kind of social distancing without an overhaul which would leave it unrecognisable.

Venice isn’t quite so bustling. The festival takes place on the Lido, the city’s beach resort, a vaporetto ride away from the tourist mecca of the Piazza San Marco. The roads around the Palazzo del Cinema are quiet, with only a scattering of autograph-hunters and selfie-takers. Queues for screenings are mercifully short, and you can get from the auditorium to the open air in seconds. Just as crucially, most of the cafes, restaurants and Spritz bars have as many tables outdoors as indoors. In Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, Gustav von Aschenbach stayed on the Lido, where he managed to ignore the cholera epidemic creeping through the city. True, it didn’t turn out too well for him, but it has always been easy to maintain your own personal space in the area.

Few settings can match it. The festivals in Toronto and San Sebastián are due to run in September, just after Venice. But the Telluride festival, which is usually scheduled for the same time, has been scotched. In October, the London Film Festival is offering “50 Virtual Festival Premieres to be enjoyed at home”.

Even in Venice, the pandemic’s effects will be apparent in one way which has nothing to do with hand sanitiser and face masks: the scarcity of high-profile American films. Venice is where such Oscar-contenders as “Arrival”, “La La Land”, “Spotlight” and “A Star Is Born” were first screened. This year, there is “Nomadland”, starring Frances McDormand and directed by Chloé Zhao, but precious little else from across the Atlantic. However much “concrete optimism” Venice can provide, the cinema industry’s Hollywood-style happy ending is still a long way away.

Read more: The race for the Oscars begins in Venice