Beyond the Red Carpet: What the International Audience Missed at the 83rd Venice Film Festival

The 83rd Venice International Film Festival wrapped up with an unexpected twist that caught critics completely off guard. The jury, led by American actress and filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal, awarded the coveted Golden Lion for Best Film to Woman Unknown (Kvinde Ukendt), a post-World War II psychological thriller directed by Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy.

For an international audience, this was celebrated simply as a major victory for a lesser-known auteur. However, to understand the reaction in Italy, one must look at the gender politics surrounding this year’s selection. El-Toukhy was one of the very few solo female directors in the main competition. The Italian press had spent weeks heavily criticizing the festival’s artistic direction for a perceived lack of female representation. The Golden Lion win was immediately viewed by local commentators as a silent, poetic rebuke by Gyllenhaal’s jury against the festival’s programming choices.

In another major sweep, Woman Unknown star Mathilde Arcel took home the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. While global outlets report this as “Best Actress,” Italians fiercely guard the name Coppa Volpi. Named after Count Giuseppe Volpi, the aristocratic founder of the festival, the award carries a specific weight of historical prestige that locals separate entirely from contemporary Hollywood awards. Meanwhile, the legendary John Malkovich won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his role in Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine.

“Mostra” vs. Festival: A Crucial Distinction

To an English speaker, Venice is a “film festival” just like Cannes or Toronto. But if you walk the Lido during these eleven days, you will rarely hear an Italian call it a festival. Instead, it is universally referred to as La Mostra.

The word mostra literally translates to “exhibition” or “showcase.” This distinction is rooted in deep historical pride. Founded in 1932, it originated as an extension of the Venice Biennale art exhibition. To Italians, calling it a mostra frames cinema strictly as a fine art form on par with painting or sculpture, stripping away the commercial, party-centric connotation of a “festival.”

The Eternal “Italia a Secco” Melodrama

Every September, a reliable cultural ritual plays out across Italian media: the collective mourning over the Italia a secco (Italy left high and dry) phenomenon. Despite packing the line-up with a large contingent of homegrown films, Italian cinema was completely shut out of the main competition awards this year.

For foreign readers, this might seem like standard awards-season luck. In Italy, however, it triggers an immediate existential crisis about the state of national art, public funding, and cultural relevance. The nation’s cinematic pride was narrowly salvaged by the sidebar Orizzonti (Horizons) section, where Italian star Riccardo Scamarcio won Best Actor for Children of the Monkey, giving local newspapers a much-needed consolation prize to print on their front pages.

Influencers on the Lido: The Purist’s Nightmare

If you scroll through international coverage of Venice, you will see flawless photos of Hollywood stars stepping off water taxis. What you won’t see is the annual domestic controversy regarding the “invasion” of the red carpet.

In Italy, a significant amount of media coverage is dedicated to criticizing the presence of local reality TV stars and social media influencers who have no connection to the films being shown. While international festivals also invite digital creators, the Italian public views the passerella (the red carpet walk) as sacred ground. The sight of a TikTok star blocking the path of a veteran director is a yearly trigger for fierce debates on the decline of cultural elitism, making the festival as much a reality TV circus as it is a celebration of high art.

Geopolitics in the Lagoon: Middle Eastern Echoes

For international film lovers, the award season is primarily about artistic merit. For the Italian public, however, the Venice Film Festival has always functioned as an intense geopolitical battleground. This year, the jury amplified that tradition by giving significant weight to films touching upon massive global friction points. The awarding of the Special Jury Prize to Naza, a devastatingly raw portrayal of life and survival in Gaza, sparked immediate and polarized debates across Italian talk shows and editorial pages.

In Italy, political discourse is deeply intertwined with cultural events, and La Mostra is no exception. While global audiences viewed the award for Naza as a standard humanitarian statement by a progressive jury, local commentators dissected it through the lens of Italy’s internal political divides, questioning the boundary between art and institutional activism. This political tension was further heightened by Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Best Director win for Dau, which dedicated crucial themes to Ukraine. The dual acknowledgment of these films turned the Lido into a microcosm of current international conflicts, proving once again that Venice is rarely just about the cinema.

The Lido’s Architecture: A Tale of Two Italies

To understand the atmosphere of Venice, foreign readers must look past the glittering photos of historic canals and look closely at the festival’s actual physical setting: The Lido. Unlike the dreamy, Renaissance-era palaces of Venice proper, the festival grounds are anchored by the Palazzo del Cinema, surrounded by a fascinatingly clashing architecture that tells a complicated story about Italy’s past.

The festival infrastructure is heavily defined by Rationalist architecture from the 1930s Fascist era—the very period when the festival was founded by the regime to project cultural dominance. For locals, walking between the stark, monumental white marble walls of the Palazzo and the nearby historic hotels induces a specific kind of architectural cognitive dissonance. It represents the duality of Italian heritage: a constant negotiation between historic grandeur and the heavy ghosts of 20th-century history. While an international tourist might just see an imposing, elegant building, an Italian reader looks at those same structures and sees the permanent scars of a complex national legacy.