Bad mothers and female agency: The 76th Venice International Film Festival

Abstract

The Venice International Film Festival held its 76th edition at Lido di Venezia from 28 August to 7 September 2019. The programme in this year’s edition had a total of twenty-one films in competition for the Golden Lion for Best Film, ultimately awarded to Todd Philip’s Joker (2019), as well as an Orizzonti (Horizons) section, which introduces feature-length and short films that showcase novel aesthetic developments in international cinema; the section Le giornate degli autori (Venice Days), a subsection of the festival that aims to spotlight original and upcoming trends in independent filmmaking; a Venice Classics section, which screens classical films that premiered in previous editions of the festival, selected by a jury of film students from Italian universities who were nominated by their professors to participate in the jury; the “Lion of the Future” section that awards the Luigi de Laurentiis Award for the best film to debut at Venice and, finally, the Venice Virtual Reality section, which featured twenty-seven virtual reality projects in competition in the recent edition.

Keywords

• venice film festival
• motherhood
• gender|female representation
• women