Netflix Will Debut Multiple Pics at Venice Film Festival

The upcoming 78th Annual Venice Film Festival is sure to be loaded with plenty of excellent films and perhaps some not-so-excellent films, but either way, it will be an event to remember as usual.

One of the distributors that will be a massive presence at the festival is Netflix, as they are set to debut multiple new films at the event come this September. While we don’t know what these films will be quite yet, expect the full line-up to consist of plenty of films distributed by the company.

“The only thing that happened between Netflix and Cannes is they changed the rules,” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos explained of the company’s issues with Cannes. “And I just thought, I don’t want to bring our films if we are uniquely excluded from [playing in] competition. And you know, my first year in Cannes [2017], we brought The Meyerowitz Stories and Okja, we had a remarkable experience.”

Sarandos has furthermore rebuked statements made by Thierry Fremaux, who is the festival artistic director for Cannes, who stated that streaming platforms don’t discover talent in the same way as more traditional methods do. 

“Cannes [has] been at this for 75 years, and we’ve been making our own original movies for about three. So we’ve got some work to do, for sure. But I would be remiss not to point out that Thierry was actually kind of a little bit wrong.” Adding a direct example of Netflix discovering young talent, “Just pointing out quickly, there’s a young filmmaker named Stefon Bristol, who we took directly out of film school at NYU, introduced to me by Spike Lee, who made his first feature called See You Yesterday that won an Independent Spirit Award, was nominated for another and he’s going to be an amazing new voice.” 

For more updates on the 78th Annual Venice Film Festival, stay tuned to Awards Radar.