The Venice International Film Festival was inaugurated in 1932: over 79 editions (which includes this year’s) 11 Italian films have been awarded the Golden Lion for Best Film.
During the Fifties, Italy began showing the world Neorealist masterpieces, but in 1954 it was Renato Castellani’s Giulietta e Romeo (Romeo and Juliet) that was recognised. The film took three years to make and locations included several cities of art and Italian landscapes such as Venice, Padua, Siena and Val d’Orcia, in addition to Verona, chosen by Shakespeare as the setting for the most famous love story of all time.
A few years later, in 1959, two Italian films tied: Mario Monicelli’s La grande guerra (The Great War) and Roberto Rossellini’s Il generale Della Rovere. Both films deal with the theme of war and have main characters who are anti-heroes (Alberto Sordi and Alessandro Gassman in the first, Vittorio De Sica in the latter) that eventually manage to redeem themselves. La grande guerra used locations in Friuli – Venzone and Gemona del Friuli in the province of Udine – while Il Generale Della Rovere was shot almost entirely in Rome and Cinecittà Studios.
Italian cinema came to the fore during the Sixties, with the addition of the rise of new stars like Claudia Cardinale, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti. The prestigious Golden Lion stayed in the Bel Paese from 1962 to 1966. It was won in 1962 by Valerio Zurlini’s Cronaca familiare (Family Diary) based on the autobiographical novel by Vasco Pratolini, and set in Rome and Florence, the film tells the story of two brothers (Jacques Perrin, Marcello Mastroianni) who are separated on their mother’s death (one adopted by a butler working for a wealthy nobleman, the other brought up in poverty by his grandmother) and later reunited by family events. Zurlini shared the award with Andrej Tarkovskij’s Ivan’s Childhood.
It was Francesco Rosi’s turn in 1963 with his Le mani sulla città (Hands over the city), a film that protested the unscrupulous construction boom in Italy during the Sixties, and focussed on the city of Naples.
The following year, Michelangelo Antonioni examined the alienation caused by modernity and industrialization in Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) where a melancholy Monica Vitti plays the depressed, tormented wife of an industrialist in an unrecognisable, dehumanized Ravenna. When the grey background and noises disappear suddenly and the pink beach on the island Budelli in the Maddalena archipelago appears, like an external object, bathed in the turquoise water of Sardinia, it is just the fairy tale she tells her son.
After missing out in 1954 for Senso and in the closely-fought competition of 1960 for Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his brothers), Luchino Visconti was awarded the Golden Lion at Venice in 1965 for Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Sandra), set and shot on location principally in Volterra where Sandra (Claudia Cardinale) goes when a park is named after her father who died in a concentration camp.
The sequence of Italian winners in the Sixties closes with Gillo Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers), an Italian-Algerian co-production, set entirely in the North African country.
On pause during the Seventies following the post 1968 protests, the Golden Lion was brought back in 1980. However, it would take until 1988 for another Italian winner to appear: Ermanno Olmi’s La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker): the adaptation of the story by Joseph Roth about an alcoholic former miner living on the streets in Paris manages to pick himself up thanks to a gift of 200 francs from a stranger.
Exactly ten years later, in 1998, Gianni Amelio won the prize with Così ridevano (The Way we Laughed), a story of migrants and integration set in a grey, dark Turin seen through the eyes of a family from the South of Italy.
In 2013, the Jury, presided by Bernardo Bertolucci, assigned the Golden Lion to Sacro GRA by Italian director Gianfranco Rosi: this, the first documentary to ever win at the Venice International Film Festival, is the story of the three years the director spent travelling in a minivan around Rome’s ring road (Grande Raccordo Anulare) in search of the invisible worlds and alternative futures that the place hides behind a wall of continuous noise.