Uff, Netflix again," whispers a British journalist in the first cinema series, as Alejandro Iñárritu's "Bardo, the invented chronicle of a handful of truths" begins and the big red "N" logo of the streaming service can be seen on the screen.

The film will be shown on the second day of the Venice Film Festival, and the colleague's complaint is also aimed at the complicated situation in which film festivals are currently finding themselves when they want to celebrate cinema, but somehow have to relate to the advance of streaming services.

In Cannes, this has already been ruled out by the competition rules, while Venice has had a more relaxed festival policy for years.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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Alfonso Cuarón's drama "Roma" was the first Netflix film to win the festival here in 2018 and subsequently received ten Oscar nominations.

The film festival on the Lido is unofficially the start of the Oscar season.

What is shown here has a good chance of being nominated next winter.

The first days of the festival are therefore mostly dominated by American productions, which at the same time guarantee Hollywood stars on the red carpet. Timothée Chalamet, Cate Blanchett and Sigourney Weaver are expected this weekend alone.

What are the chances of cinema?

If you want to cast a few curious glances at the red carpet, first walk along the long promenade along the Lido, past the picturesque, decaying Hotel des Bains, where Thomas Mann resided and was inspired for “Death in Venice”.

Cinema posters are lined up between the pine trees.

In previous years, the streaming productions had almost completely taken up the advertising space, as if they wanted to prove that they really belonged too.

This year, an Italian production company is promoting Paolo Virzì's new film.

The word “Siccità”, which translates as “drought”, “dryness”, jumps out at the viewer on a turquoise background.

Virzì's film will premiere out of competition.

The director explores how the people of Rome would fare if there were no more rain for three years.

The French film diva Catherine Deneuve evokes the magic of going to the cinema once again on the opening night when she accepts the lion of honor for her life's work in a fiery red dress: "I love going to the cinema, seeing a film with people I don't know.

You don't have that whole atmosphere at home.” American actress Julianne Moore, this year's competition jury chair, also looks back at the future of cinema.

Art should come before economic aspects, she said in a statement to the press.

Outside the festival palace, the posters for the opening film “White Noise” by Noah Baumbach rotate on the advertising space of a credit card company that sponsors the festival.

Baumbach filmed Don DeLillo's 1985 novel.

The money for this film also came from Netflix, so the streaming service can now remove the opening of one of the most important film festivals from its wish list.

And yet Baumbach fulfills Julianne Moore's wish, because his adaptation makes no artistic compromises.

The dialogue is DeLillo originals, the set revels in 1980s nostalgia, and he was able to use Hollywood A-league for the cast: Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig play the leading roles, Don Cheadle the supporting role.

Memory of Morricone

The Mexican Alejandro G. Iñárritu turned it up a bit more in his Netflix film "Bardo".

For more than 170 minutes, he tells the story of an artist in crisis, sometimes satirically exaggerating current economic and political problems (a subplot based on the idea that Amazon wants to buy part of Mexico with US consent), sometimes severe find pictures for her.

He lets his protagonists run through the desert with migrants along the American border and later climb higher and higher into the air over the remains of their clothing and belongings until, from a bird's eye view, things blur into colorful dots in the white sand, lost in sight as if those lives whose disappearance no longer makes a headline in any news program.

Since film festivals are not only about the future of cinema, but always also about looking at its past, an icon of Italian filmmaking is honored at the Lido.

A small open-air exhibition in the shopping street commemorates the composer Ennio Morricone.

Between the small bars, large-format film images are reminiscent of Westerns with Clint Eastwood and Claudia Cardinale, for which Morricone wrote his unmistakable musical accompaniment.

Some fathers stop with their children and explain who the man in the pictures is.

And one hopes they still have a DVD player at home to show them these classics - because they're rare to find on Netflix.