From Red Ink to Red Carpets: Inside the Business of the Venice Film Festival

Alberto Barbera admits that he has made plenty of mistakes.

When Barbera, who hails from the Piedmontese textile town of Biella, took over for the first time as artistic director of The Venice Film Festival in 1999, the situation was dire: The Festival, which is controlled by the government-supported Biennale Foundation, was a mess. He remembers that the facilities on the Lido were lousy, attendance by top Hollywood stars and producers was underwhelming and as a business, Venice was a loss-making proposition. In the scorching heat of late August and early September in Venice, there wasn’t even any air conditioning at the Palazzo del Cinema. 

Barbera has helped to turn all that around. He was twice named as artistic director by Paolo Baratta, the legendary president of the Biennale Foundation, who would over the years channel millions of dollars of new investments to the festival, completely refurbishing the Palazzo del Cinema and adding extension annexes.

“I chose Alberto in 1999 because I wanted an artistic director who would be absolutely independent, and not subject to any political influence,” Barratta recalled in an interview.

Yet in 2001, when Silvio Berlusconi was elected prime minister, his culture minister, Giuliano Urbani, decided to get rid of Barbera. He literally pushed him out of the job, a year before the end of his four-year mandate. So Barbera took a long hiatus from the festival, and returned to his native Piedmont to curate smaller film festivals and museums. He was not reappointed to Venice until more than a decade later. This time, however, when Barbera returned as festival director in 2012, Baratta was waiting, and together they worked to implement their relaunch plans.

Over the past dozen years, Barbera has proven to be more than just an astute film picker; his creative management of the festival might qualify as a case study of how to turn around and grow a festival business. To be sure, his work was made easier thanks to the strong backing of two past presidents of both Baratta and another former president, Roberto Cicutto. Both men helped to guide the ambitious revival of the festival. Barbera worked with the Biennale Foundation to further modernize the infrastructure, he relentlessly promoted a more active business market, and he has provided a steady flow of high-quality films over the years.

These days Barbera likes to brag about how Venice has overtaken Cannes in terms of the number of Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning films they have previewed. He is not wrong. In the last three years, between 2022 and 2024, films screened at Cannes received 56 Oscar nominations, while Venice had 77 nominations. Cannes-originated films won five Oscars, while films that had premiered at Venice won 14.

But does Venice make money? Does the Festival turn a profit, or does it just keep its head above water? Spoiler: it breaks even on 23 million euros ($25.5 million) of annual revenues, but only thanks to government grants and the support of the Biennale Foundation, so it is heavily subsidized.

It is worth remembering that there are plenty of festivals that don’t make money. Government grants are key in Cannes and Berlin as well as in Venice. Most festivals operate on a non-profit model and rely on sponsorships, donations and public and private sector grants as their main form of income. Ticket sales usually amount to merely a small percentage of a festival’s revenues. This is also true in Venice, where ticket sales brought in only around 2 million euros ($2.2 million) in 2023, or ten percent of the total budget of 23 million euros. The rest of the 23 million came from a Ministry of Culture grant of 13.7 million euros ($15 million), sponsorships worth around 5 million euros ($5.5 million), and about 2 million euros in funding from the festival’s mothership, the Biennale Foundation.

In the complex world of Italian state-controlled entities, where many org charts look like spider webs, the Biennale Foundation is a relatively simple creature. It is a private foundation whose four-person board is nominated by the Ministry of Culture (2), the Region of the Veneto (1) and the City of Venice (1). It employs more than 200 people, 118 of them full-time employees.

The government ministry last year gave a total of 16 million euros ($17.8 million) of grants to the Biennale Foundation, or one fourth of its total revenues of 66 million euros ($73 million). The culture ministry also has the role of choosing a President of the Biennale, who is also a board member. What is especially interesting, in Italy, is that although the president is often chosen because of his or her political affinities, the operating units that the Foundation controls actually have complete creative and operational autonomy. The Art Biennale, which has a budget similar to that of the film festival, is the one that makes the most money. The profitability of Art in 2022 came from the sale of 800,000 tickets, and it is believed to have made as much as 10 million euros ($11.1 million) in operating profit. Part of this profit, says local Venice journalist and veteran Biennale-watcher Enrico Tantucci, will have been used to subsidize the smaller sectors of the Biennale Foundation, such as dance, theater and music. 

Taken together, the entire Biennale Foundation made a net profit of 2.5 million euros ($2.7 million) in 2023 on 66 million euros ($73.4 million) of revenues, and declared a cash reserve of 26 million euros ($28.9 million), which is not bad for a public-private entity in Italy, or anywhere.

Of course, the Biennale relies heavily on public funding, with generous cash grants from the culture ministry and the free use of valuable real estate from the City of Venice. 

Italy’s Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, told The Hollywood Reporter that his ministry contributes annually to Venice, and will continue to do so, but that he is especially proud of having piloted through some 170 million euros ($187 million) of recent modernization grants for the Biennale Foundation from European Next Generation funds.

“Cinema represents the most modern form of art, and we consider Venice to be of the highest importance,” Sangiuliano, a former Rai executive, told me. He said the Venice Film Festival “is an unparalleled international showcase that combines the beauty of Venice with the seventh art.” The minister even sent me a Whatsapp after the interview with a photo of himself and the Biennale Foundation’s president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, inspecting new infrastructure projects at the Arsenale.

So while the culture ministry is investing lots of money, and the region contributes very modestly, the city of Venice does not give a dime. Instead, it gives a value that is worth millions of euros a year, thanks to a decades-old agreement whereby the City of Venice lets the Biennale and the Festival live rent-free in some of the world’s most expensive canal-side real estate. The Biennale’s Gothic fifteenth century palace on the Grand Canal near Saint Mark’s Square is actually owned by the city but it is leased rent-free to the Biennale. The same goes for the Palazzo del Cinema and the Palazzo del Casino, site of the film festival on the Lido, and the sprawling acreage of the Arsenale area, which amounts to nearly a fifth of the size of Venice.

The Palazzo del Biennale in Ca’ Giustinian alone is worth north of $75 million and the legendary palazzi on the Lido are probably worth the same again according to local journalist Tantucci, who added that it would cost at least ten million euros a year or more to rent all of that property.

When I went to see Alberto Barbera last week, it was 90 degrees in the shade on the Lido, the kind of oppressive summer day that will slay you, whether you take the vaporetto across the lagoon or a taxi boat. The huge corridors of the imposing Mussolini-era Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido were empty and silent when I arrived. The Palazzo first opened in 1937, five years after Il Duce had personally founded the festival in order to promote Italian cinema. For the first four years, the festival was held at the next door Hotel Excelsior, which is now the epicenter of deal-making and of being seen.

I found Barbera on the second floor, holed up in an office with a postcard view of the red carpet and the beach below.  He was dressed casually in a dark grey Fila cotton polo and khaki trousers, plus his trademark blue Converse sneakers. He looked cool and refreshed (thanks to the air conditioning) and he seemed to be in pre-Festival mode. He looked like a man ready to welcome a few celebs, just a few, like Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Joaquin Phoenix, Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Daniel Craig, Adrien Brody, George Clooney and Monica Bellucci, who all appear in the fest’s 2024 lineup. Barbera will be especially careful to make sure that the paths of two of his top stars do not cross: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, in the middle of bitter divorce, will not even be in Venice on the same days during the Festival. To get ready for all this, the director and a small skeletal staff have been laboring throughout the dog days of summer.

I start by asking Barbera what lessons he had learned, and what mistakes he’s made in more than fifteen years of running the Festival.

“The first mistake I made was in 1999, the first time I was appointed as director, and that was to cancel the first tentative effort to build a market in Venice. I worried about the lack of space and I wrongly thought that internet would have taken over and supported the relationship between producers and sales agents and buyers and so on, which is the opposite of what happened actually,” recalls Barbera. “Film markets were all growing in all the festivals, and Venice was the only one without a market. So we had to come up with a strategy.”

That strategy would have to wait until 2012, when Baratta brought Barbera back as artistic director. By then, he was ready to implement his plans, and the Biennale Foundation was prepared to back him.

I asked him to describe the relaunch of Venice. What did he do to persuade Hollywood to invest in a greater presence on the Lido?

“First, I made a roadshow to convince the Americans, the studios, the majors, to come back to Venice because they had stopped coming, they were going to Toronto instead of coming to the Lido. Second, I decided to reduce the number of films, counting on the quality of the films instead of the quantity. Third, I asked the Biennale to make major capital investments to renovate and refurbish all the structures, all the venues, all the facilities that we had, and to build new theaters. And lastly, I worked a lot to convince professionals, the business to come back to Venice instead of just Toronto. We needed to have producers, buyers, sales agents, distributors — everybody involved with the film industry and we succeeded in bringing them back to Venice.”

Asked to describe the Festival in business terms, Barbera smiles. “I would call it a business that keeps on growing, year after year, in terms of prestige but also in terms of numbers. Every year we have between five and 10 percent higher accreditation numbers, more audience, more professionals attending the festival. And the success of this event is still growing.”

He admits that were it not for the support of the Biennale Foundation he would not break even, and he shares that “in some years, Art or Architecture are more profitable and their surplus helps the Biennale to contribute to our budget for our fixed costs.” In other words, the mothership takes from the rich and gives to the needy, with profits from Art Biennale being used mainly to help subsidize the smaller theater, music and dance events.

Before leaving the Lido, I ask Barbera to talk about the differences between Venice and Cannes. “I think the main difference is in terms of calendar, because Cannes comes at the end of the old season, and Venice is just at the beginning of the new season,” he says. “After all, the new season starts in September, which is also the beginning of the campaign for the Oscar for the American cinema. And in recent years we have had more Oscar nominated and Oscar winning films than Cannes,” he adds, with a mischievous smile.

Julka Villa, the head of marketing for the 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) a year Campari drinks group, is a big fan of Barbera. She has watched him over the past seven years in which Campari has been a main festival sponsor. She loves to recall that Campari’s ties to cinema go back to 1984, when Federico Fellini shot his first-ever TV spot for Campari. 

Villa says that Barbera has been a guarantee of quality for Venice. “I think he has done a very good job of establishing Venice with its own personality, with a very specific curation. He has made it not just an important film festival, but one that gives a lot of importance to the content, to maintaining high standards,” she notes.

Campari, along with the other main sponsors Cartier, Armani Beauty and Mastercard, provides most of the Festival’s 5 million euros ($5.5 million) of annual sponsorship revenues at Venice. Campari’s Villa will not disclose Campari’s contribution but she says it is an excellent investment. “The founding values of Campari include creativity, and film is one of the most important creative arts, so we are on brand” says Villa.

Campari also started sponsoring Cannes three years ago, and is a sponsor at Berlin and Locarno as well. “Venice is important to us because it is one of the most prestigious film festivals, and really open to the general public, so it is very democratic,” says Villa. “Venice is also important to Campari because it is really where the Aperol Spritz first became popular.”

Soon the favorite red cocktail will be ubiquitous on the terrace bar of the Excelsior, as Hollywood royalty and the suits, together with three thousand thirsty journalists, descend on the Lido.

Alberto Barbera looks like a man who is satisfied with his life. He can happily look out from his corner office to the red carpet below. Even better, he doesn’t have to deal with red ink.

Alan Friedman is the Editor-At-Large of THR Roma, The Hollywood Reporter’s Italian edition.