Algerian filmmaker Sofia Djama is no stranger to the Venice International Film Festival. In fact, in 2017 her first feature film, The Blessed, won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actress for Lyna Khoudri. This year, she's returning to Venice as a jury member, on the Orizzonti jury presided by Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet.
Other members of the same jury include Italian filmmaker Laura Bispuri, whose third feature film, The Peacock’s Paradise, was presented in the Orizzonti section last year; Antonio Campos from the U.S., a producer, writer and director whose latest venture is The Staircase, a limited series on HBO Max (Sky in Europe) starring Colin Firth, Toni Collette and Juliette Binoche; and rounding it out is festival director and journalist Edouard Waintrop, who has served as Artistic Director of the Directors Fortnight at Cannes, as well as a short stint last year as Director of the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, KSA.
The Orizzonti Jury will award the following prizes, with no joint awards allowed: Orizzonti Award for Best Film, Orizzonti Award for Best Director, Special Orizzonti Jury Prize, Orizzonti Award for Best Actress, Orizzonti Award for Best Actor, Orizzonti Award for Best Screenplay, Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film.
The Competition jury was already announced last week, and you can check out who will be on it here.
At the same time, the festival also announced the jury which will be deciding the “Luigi De Laurentiis” Venice Award for a Debut Film of the 79 Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia (31 August -10 September 2022), directed by Alberto Barbera. This award is decided by considering all debut feature-length films selected from the various competitive sections of the Venice Film Festival (Official Selection and Independent and Parallel Sidebars), with no joint awards allowed. The Lion of the Future – “Luigi De Laurentiis” Venice Award for a Debut Film comes with a cash prize of 100,000 USD donated by Filmauro, to be divided equally between the director and the producer.
Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino is the president of this jury, with Polish director and writer Jan P. Matuszynski, Portuguese artist and filmmaker Ana Rocha de Sousa, American actress Tessa Thompson and French producer and costume designer Rosalie Varda joining him, as jury members. Frammartino's latest film The Hole screened in Competition in 2021, winning the Special Jury Prize; Matuszynski's Leave no Traces (2021), his latest film, was screened in competition in Venice; Rocha de Sousa's debut feature, Listen, premiered at the 77Venice Film Festival winning not only the Lion of the future but also the Special Orizzonti Jury Prize; most recently, Thompson can be seen as ‘Valkyrie’ in Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder; and Varda has designed the costumes for the films Passion (1982) by Jean-Luc Godard, Une chambre en ville (1982) by Jacques Demy and One Hundred and One Nights (1995) by Agnès Varda -- beloved filmmaker and Rosalie's late mother.
For more information about La Biennale di Venezia -- Venice International Film Festival, check out their website.
