Already announced in April, Maggie Gyllenhaal will preside over the International Jury of the Venezia 83 Competition, scheduled from September 2 to 12. Director, actress, screenwriter and producer, Gyllenhaal returns to the Lido after The Lost Daughter, her directorial debut adapted from Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, which won Best Screenplay in Venice and later received three Oscar nominations. This year she directed The Bride!, confirming an increasingly distinctive path within a personal, restless cinematic language, inhabited by complex female figures.
Alongside her is Kaouther Ben Hania, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Tunisian cinema, able to move between realism, fiction and documentary with a gaze consistently focused on power, injustice and bodies exposed to oppressive systems. Her The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize in Venice and was nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film. Her previous film, Four Daughters, had already won the Œil d’Or at Cannes and received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
Bringing a sound and visual sensibility to the jury is Daniel Blumberg, British composer and artist, author of the score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, awarded both the Oscar and the BAFTA. He also composed the scores for Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds and Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. Musician, improviser and draughtsman, Blumberg works with an expressive language that moves across sound, image and performance.
Francesco Casetti, Italian-American scholar and Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale, is one of the most authoritative figures in international film studies. Through his books, from Inside the Gaze to the more recent Screening Fears, his theoretical work has helped define cinema as experience, device and cultural form.
French director Xavier Giannoli’s filmography is shaped by literature, social novel and grand cinematic storytelling. Palme d’Or for the short film L’Interview, César for Best Film with Lost Illusions, Giannoli has moved through Cannes, Venice and Telluride, also creating the series Of Money and Blood.
Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat, now based in Hamburg after the fall of Kabul, has introduced international audiences to an intimate and political Afghan cinema, marked by a distinctive feminist perspective. Of her ambitious five-part film project, the first three chapters have already been released: Wolf and Sheep, The Orphanage and No Good Men, presented between Cannes and Berlin.
Completing the jury is Johnnie To, the Hong Kong master of noir and action. Founder, together with Wai Ka-fai, of the production company Milkyway Image, he has built a cinema of spatial geometries, moral tension and ritualized gestures. Venice knows him well: four of his films have screened at the Lido, Throw Down, Exiled, Mad Detective and Life Without Principle.
