The Venice Film Festival is focusing on its artistic roots this year, courting celebrated directors and not flashy Hollywood blockbusters.
Festival director Alberto Barbera trimmed the number of movies premièring at the world's oldest film festival, which opened Wednesday, to just 18 in competition for the coveted Golden Lion, Venice's top prize. And the overall selection is just 60 films - about half the offerings in previous years.
"I don't like this idea of making it bigger and bigger year after year," Barbera said. "Toronto is getting bigger and bigger every year, and the same thing for Cannes and Berlin and so on. And I don't like that. It's not a proper way to promote a film."
The Venice lineup is heavy on auteur favourites like Terrence Malick, who premières To The Wonder on Sunday and Paul Thomas Anderson, who travels to the Lido with The Master on Saturday.
Both films are coups for Barbera, who returned this year to the festival he directed from 1998 to 2002 and hopes to crystallize Venice's identity as an artistic venue.
"Usually there are studio films here, even out of competition, to give it some glitz," said Maria Grazia Vairo, the Romebased head of acquisitions for Eagle Pictures, an Italian film distributor.
The 69th Venice Film Festival opened with the world première of Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an adaptation of the bestselling novel about a young Pakistani whose Wall Street career veers off course after the 9/11 terror attacks.
The festival ends on Sept. 8.
