The American director Damien Sazel will be the president of the 80’s jury Film Festival (Samples) of Venicewhich will award the Golden Lion to one of the films that will compete at the Lido from August 30 to September 9, as the festival announced today.

“For ten days, every year this city of the art of Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese is transformed into a city of cinema, and I feel very honored by the challenge of chairing the committee this year,” the Oscar-winning director said in a statement “La La Land”.

Only 38 years old, Damien Chazelle, whose film “Babylon” (2022) received three nominations at last year’s Oscars, is an old acquaintance of the festival, which opened in 2016 with “La La Land” and in 2018 with “First Man” (“The first man”).

For her part, French filmmaker Alice Diop, 44, will be president of the jury for the best first film, which will award the Lion of the Future, which she herself won in 2022 along with the Silver Lion for the first of the fiction feature film “Saint-Omer”.

“It’s a great honor and a pleasure,” said Alice Diop, hailing “a festival that welcomed me and gave me so much last year.”

Her film, which also received the César Award for Best First Film and the Jean Vigo Award, was also France’s Oscar nominee.

The president of the jury of the parallel section Orizzonti (“Horizons”) will be the Italian Jonas Carpignano, 39, creator of “Mediterranea” (2015), which was presented at the Critics’ Week in Cannes, and “A Ciambra” (2017) .

Last year, the Venice Film Festival turned the spotlight on the opioid problem by awarding a documentary about photographer Nan Goldin and her fight against this health scandal that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States (“All The Beauty And The Bloodshed”).

The jury chaired by actress Julianne Moore had awarded the Golden Lion to 58-year-old director Laura Poitras, honoring a female director for the third time, after Frenchwoman Audrey Dugoin in 2021 (“The Event”) and Chinese-American Chloe Zhao (“Nomadland”). in 2020.