Many of the eyes at the Venice Film Festival that begins on Wednesday will be focused on the red carpet and the competition jury. But there is another jury dedicated to honoring films of the past and documentaries about cinema.
Venice Classics was created in 2012 by Alberto Barbera, the artistic director of the festival, who then added prizes and a student jury. The jury members are drawn from the fields of film history and criticism, as well as production, the performing arts and music. Each group is guided by a film professional, generally a director.
“Venezia Classici is designed primarily to introduce young people to great films of the past or (in other cases) to encourage a re-evaluation of the generally unfavorable critical reception that accompanied their release,” Barbera said in an email through a publicist.
Each jury has around 24 students, who decide on the prizes for the best restored film and the best documentary about cinema. This year, the jury will be viewing and choosing from a wide variety of films, including John Cassavetes’s “Minnie and Moskowitz,” Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not To Be,” Ann Hui’s “The Story of Woo Viet,” Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy,” Alexander Kluge’s “Yesterday Girl” and Roger Corman’s “The Wild Angels.”
Students are nominated for the jury in the spring by professors from universities across Italy. They are either about to graduate or have recently graduated, and are divided into two groups, with one group evaluating for each prize.
Sara Coppola, a 2023 jury member from Puglia, was selected by the professor of a class she took in Italian cinema. She recalled viewing Iranian, Ukrainian and Japanese movies that she had never seen before, but that was only part of the attraction of the jury for her.
“We had to talk about everything,” Coppola said in a video interview. “In my opinion that was the most amazing opportunity of being in the jury.” She contrasted the experience with those she has had in Italian university classrooms, which are more lecture focused.
The jury chair is on hand to offer members relevant background on the films. Coppola recalls the chair the year she was on the jury, Andrea Pallaoro, whose movie “The Echo Chamber” is in this year’s main competition, pointing out how some scenes were filmed and talking about his own experiences on set. This year’s jury chair is Daniele Vicari, a director who also runs a public, tuition-free film school in Rome.
Jurors attend public screenings in a reserved row — similar to other juries at the festival — and sometimes see restored films with their directors in attendance. For Coppola, that included Amir Naderi, who directed “Harmonica,” about an Iranian boy who gets a musical instrument as a present, and Stephanie Rothman, who directed “The Working Girls,” about three young women getting by in 1970s Los Angeles.
“She was full of energy and I was like, Oh my God, I want to be like her at that age,” Coppola said of Rothman, who is in her 80s.
Jurors usually view about two movies a day, though there can be as many as five, depending on the logistics of scheduling. Francesco Turchi, a member of the 2025 jury, particularly appreciated the merits of “The Ghost,” a 1963 Italian Gothic thriller, and “Roma Ore 11,” a 1952 film based on actual events in which one woman died and dozens of women were injured when a staircase collapsed while they were waiting for a job interview.
Turchi said in an email interview that, last year, the discussions about the films were so interesting and lasted so long that he and his fellow jurors continued them during every moment of the festival, during lunch, at dinner and even at the bar in the evening.
At the night’s end, jurors can find themselves among throngs of festival attendees running to catch the boat from the Lido, the island where the film festival takes place, to the city.
Rather than passing judgment on the quality of the restorations, Barbera said that jurors evaluate “the impact that a classic film can have on today’s audience.” Tommaso Santambrogio, a filmmaker who served as jury chair last year, remembered how the students deepened their thinking as they had more films under their belts.
“The first reaction was emotional,” Santambrogio said in an interview. “But then, because we were watching three movies per day, and then talking about them the morning after, it was super interesting to see how they were digesting those movies and relating them to contemporary life and the art of cinema.”
The winners are announced at the festival’s closing night awards ceremony, which the students can attend.
Last year’s best restored film was Bahram Beyzaie’s 1989 drama, “Bashu, the Little Stranger,” which follows an Iranian boy who is orphaned when his family is killed in the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s. The winning documentary on cinema “Mata Hari” — directed by Joe Beshenkovsky and James A. Smith — was about David Carradine’s unfinished 1970s feature film about a Dutch spy and exotic dancer during World War I.
After the festival, the student jurors, whose names aren’t announced by the festival, return to their homes across Italy. Not everyone goes on to a movie-related profession or field of study, but Turchi, the juror who served last year, said that he was inspired to pursue a master’s degree about “the production and management of cinema” that includes an apprenticeship.
It took Coppola, the 2023 jury member, a beat before eventually getting a Fulbright scholarship and pursuing a doctorate at an American university. But the jury tenure was still fresh in her mind even a few years later.
She said she would have changed one thing about her experience.
“I wanted to give the prize to the Mexican movie ‘Profundo Carmesí’ by Arturo Ripstein,” she said, referring to the film that was released as “Deep Crimson” in the United States in 1997.
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