Anchored to the present, in search of the future

The winner of the GdA Director’s Award at the 22nd edition of Giornate is the film Daroon-E Amir (Inside Amir) by the Iranian filmmaker Amir Azizi, a personal story that probes the quandry of staying in one’s city – or else leaving. The city Amir Azizi shows us is Tehran, and it is just the director’s discreet gaze at the people and places he puts on screen that gives the film an additional register that speaks the same language as Sepideh Farsi when she reminds us that now, for cinema as well, this is “the time for activism”.

“Our jury this year,” declare Gaia Furrer and Giorgio Gosetti, “chose to honor a film that answers a question that is simple, yet radical: what do we really leave behind when we leave our own country? Through daily little gestures, Azizi constructs a narrative straddling the past and the future, suspended between belonging and uprooting oneself. It’s a film that becomes at once a love letter and a farewell, which gives value to human relations, the present, and the complexity of life.”

The 2025 Europa Cinema Labels Award went to Arkoudotrypa (Bearcave) by Stergios Dinopoulos and Krysianna B. Papadakis. This accolade singles out European films and co-productions, and the winning film can count on Europa Cinemas’ support in promoting it and giving it a wider distribution.

This year saw the People’s Choice Award bestowed on not one but two films: Memory by Vladlena Sandu and A Sad and Beautiful World by Cyril Aris, both with 77,4% of the audience vote. 

An independent sidebar of the Venice Film Festival promoted by the film associations ANAC and 100autori, Giornate degli Autori is hosted by the Venice Biennale and owes its own autonomy to the support of the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate General for Cinema and SIAE, which handed this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award named after Andrea Purgatori to Italy’s preeminent noir meister, the director Dario Argento. Also crucial to the success of Giornate degli Autori 2025 is the support of I WONDER, which has backed our mission for three years now, by promoting cinema alive to the political, social, and cultural changes of our times.

Our lineup this year kicked off with the film Memory by Vladlena Sandu, an autobiographical work that hones in on the atrocities of war and violence, the first of many political themes touched on by the films in Giornate degli Autori’s official selection, which our Artistic Director Gaia Furrer, together with the selection committee, chose so that this year’s festival would be ever mindful of the present. In particular, the competition lineup turned the spotlight on the genocide underway in Palestine, hosting, among other events, the Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi for a talk devoted to the Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona, killed in the bombings of last April 25th.

For five years now, the Casa degli Autori has hosted screenings and other events at the Sala Laguna and the multifunctional spaces open to journalists, audiences, and film professionals. The conference series #confronti, made possible by the support of Intesa Sanpaolo, brought a lively sampling of talks, screenings, and debates to the 2025 program by day and handed the venues over by night: to our section Venetian Nights, the edgy showcase of Italian films created jointly with Isola Edipo and co-directed by Gaia Furrer and Silvia Jop. It was at Isola Edipo’s venue that Nobel-Prize-winner Annie Ernaux and Céline Sciamma read out the manifesto “From Venice to Gaza”, in support of the Palestinian cause.

The Miu Miu Women’s Tales project, with thirty short films to its credit to date, created by some of the best-known and most remarkable women filmmakers in the world, for 2025 offered up works by Joanna Hogg and Alice Diop in the Sala Perla and burnished the program at the Veneto Region /Veneto Film Commission Space at the Hotel Excelsior with an event lineup moderated by Penny Martin, who engaged Emma Corrin, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Myha’la, Alisha Boe, and Sarah Catherine Hook in notable conversations.

In our ten days on the Lido, in Venice with their films or else taking part in our talks with fest audiences, we have welcomed actors, actresses, filmmakers, musicians, screenwriters, and artists of the caliber of the great author Annie Ernaux, Stefano Accorsi, Francesca Andreoli, Sharunas Bartas, Federico Cesari, Francesco Colella, Gianni Di Gregorio, Francesco Di Leva, Giuliana de Sio, Sofian El Fani, Donatella Finocchiaro, Iaia Forte, Valeria Golino, Dag Johan Haugerud, Tecla Insolia, Miriam Leone, Milo Manara, Saul Nanni, Edoardo Pesce, Benedetta Porcaroli, Greta Scarano, Albert Serra, Josh Siegel, Claire Simon, Lina Soualem, and Jasmine Trinca.

The numbers for Giornate degli Autori are going upwards and onwards, more proof of the event’s appeal to an audience that found our lineup to be culturally complementary to that of Venice at large. The venues at the Casa degli Autori saw over 5,600 visitors in attendance, with nearly all the events and screenings sold out. Numbers are also soaring on social media, especially Instagram and TikTok, with the former surpassing 2.4 million organic views and the latter over 850,000, a demonstration of how closely our event is followed online and beyond Italy as well.