Jacob Elordi, Netflix speed boats and the long queue for cappuccino: a Venice Diary–part 1

My trip to Venice gets off to a false start when, on the 12pm flight from London Heathrow a person on the plane ahead of us opens a door on the runway. Hoards of police arrive to escort him away and we are made to sit for an hour on the tarmac while the situation is sorted. We spy the emergency slide in full jettison—usually reserved for a water landing. Perhaps he thinks he is already in Venice. 

What attending a few film film festivals now has taught me is that the plane and airport themselves can be opportunities for the most fruitful networking—and celeb spotting. On our flight, my colleague Luke and I bump into our Editor-in-Chief, Charles Finch, also in town for the festival. (He jokes that he’d expected us to be on the 6am flight). A friend WhatsApps us to say that she has spied actress Mia Goth—in town for the premiere of Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein—on her flight. At our airport arrivals, we realize George McKay, in town for Rose Nevada, had been on ours. I spy him chatting with some producers at the baggage reclaim and the paparazzi swarm him when we arrive at the airport’s boat terminal. 

This is my first time at Venice Film Festival. It’s regarded as being more commercial than Cannes, and is seen as marking the beginning of the awards season. Unlike Cannes, Netflix are allowed to première films here, and as we wait for the waterbus to the island, I spy a Netflix boat ready to ferry its executives into the city. 

In the leadup to the festival, I had been a little apprehensive about how the hell you even get around a city made of water with anything that resembles efficiency. Luckily, Chris Cotonou, our Deputy Editor—also a travel expert—is quick with assistance, explaining we need the Allilunga—a water bus which will take us to the island, and creating a map of places to avoid (‘Tourists’), and places to check out, including the Lido, a strip of land off the main island where the festival all takes place.

As the evening closes, there is an extreme downpour and crashes of thunder. My colleagues already on the ground had warned me of the humidity and to bring an umbrella and a rain jacket (I brought neither). With all the rain, it feels fitting for Venice to ooze such a gothic atmosphere—a city known, particularly in film, for its oscillations between extreme elegance and horror, from The Souvenir Now to Don’t Look Now.

On the first evening I had planned to see After The Hunt, the latest offering from Luca Guadagnino—a MeToo saga set in a college with Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield. I had been particularly intrigued as my old film professor, JD Rhodes told me he had a small cameo (it was partially filmed at Selwyn College in Cambridge). I get to the water bus terminal with good intentions, but when the rain reaches an almighty climax and there is a 35 minute wait for a vaporetto, I make a reluctant decision to skip the film—which is met with tepid reviews. I decide I’ll make my way to the Lido in the morning.

The sky is clearer. I make my way to the Lido from San Zaccharia. What I learn quickly with Venice, is that when you aren’t sure where to go, just follow other people in lanyards. I stand in a long line for the morning shuttle over to the Lido. There are two routes—one that involves a follow up bus and one that gets you straight to Lido Casinò—the festival area which is built round palatial, white modernist buildings. I join the queue for coffee and cornetti, which takes 15 minutes but is worth the wait. 

I am here to see Jay Kelly at the Palabiennale—a monstrously large theatre which seats over 1700 people. Directed by Noah Baumbach, it is one of Netflix’s films at the festival and stars George Clooney as a version of himself. A hugely famous actor, Jay experiences something of an existential crisis when an old friend from acting school comes back into his life, and his daughter leaves for college. It has whispers of Fellini, but ultimately more slapstick and sentimental. People are already saying it’s in the running for an Oscar (later I see a man who looks like George Clooney, before realising he’s just a well dressed Italian man). I am a little jealous, however, of my colleagues Luke and Fatima, who go to see Park Chan Wook’s No Other Choice, which they both adore. A satire about masculinity and AI set in a paper factory. They are both already convinced it will win the main prize, the Leone D’Oro. Luke later spots Son Ye-jin—the film’s female lead—at a pizzeria on the Lido and freaks out to us on WhatsApp. 

The main event of the day, however, is our A Rabbit’s Foot dinner with Cartier—one of the festival’s key sponsors—and hosted by our Editor-in-Chief Charles Finch at the Gritti Palace, which is one of Venice’s most iconic hotels. First I make a trip over to the Cipriani in Venice, for a quick meeting. It is filled with influencers and film people. Another downpour of rain starts. The person I am with explains that in late summer and early September, Venice is prone to ‘rain bombs’—when the atmosphere gets more and more charged and it cracks into heavy rain. I have a hot chocolate on the terrace by the pool as it subsides. As I wait for the Cipriani shuttle boat, Chloë Sevigny walks past me, on her way to a premiere in a sculptural dress made of lace. 

A celebration of the ‘craft of cinema’, the key guests for the evening are Jacob Elordi, the towering star of Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, due to premiere on Saturday night, as well as Sofia Coppola, in town for her documentary Marc by Sofia and the biggest legend of them all, her father, Francis Ford Coppola. Sofia and her father are very sweet together, holding hands. As they take seats for dinner, he whispers jokingly to her, ‘are we going to see a movie?’

Other stars there include Riley Keough, who I’d seen in Jay Kelly that morning—and is kitted out in Cartier jewels. Felix Kammerer (also in Frankenstein) looks incredible in Loewe. Alicia Silverstone, who is in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, which showed a few days prior, causes some of our team to feel the most starstruck as 90s kids who grew up on Clueless. The dinner turns into an afterparty on the Gritti Rooftop—Rashida Jones and George Mackay arrive, as well as other Cartier guests. The atmosphere feels like a Sorrentino film (the director has premiered his latest, La Grazia, earlier in the week). The highlight of the evening however, is learning that Elordi—a true cinephile—is a fan of A Rabbit’s Foot and says that one of his favourite films, A Year of Living Dangerously, he first discovered in the pages of the magazine. When a stack of the magazines go missing, we joke that he might have taken them.

We all meet early at the Gritti Palace in order to do our content rollout from the night before—the team all a little tired but consoled by being in such sumptuous surroundings. As we have breakfast on the terrace, standing-up rowers—a technique unique to Venice called Voga alla Veneta keep on passing us. The has been taken over by Cartier for the festival, and many of its ambassadors stay here. But they aren’t the only fashion brand in town. Mrs Prada is reportedly at the hotel—in town for Miu Miu Women’s Tales, her film division which has a presence at the festival. 

Fashion is naturally a key part of the Venice Film Festival—but not all of it so highbrow. On the Lido I spy a man holding a sign looking for beautiful women to model. I see lines of women smiling for photographs in what look like Miss World-style competitions, a bit sleazy, very Italian. 

Yet politics is an even bigger part of the festival this year, in particular the responses to the genocide in Gaza. Before arriving here I’d seen a photo on Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker Lina Soualem’s Instagram story of Pasolini’s boat, which has been covered in Palestinian flags. She urges us to see ‘Who is Still Alive’, a film by Nicolas Wadimoff, about the lives of Palestinians who have escaped Gaza, later in the week. 

After getting one of the worst meals I’ve ever had for €30 (Chris had recommended a place called Birra Forst, for their famous brown bread trapizzini, but I stupidly ignored his advice), I head to the Lido. At 5pm a pro-Palestine demonstration takes place near the festival. I find the conflict reflected in more oblique ways at the festival. I go and see Cover-Up, the latest documentary from Laura Poitras (she is best known for her documentary about Nan Goldin and the Sackler-produced opioid crisis). It is a portrait of Seymour M. Hersch, an investigative journalist who exposes government corruption from Watergate to American war crimes in Vietnam.  

I finish the day by seeing Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother—a triptych of familial stories starring the likes of Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps and Charlotte Rampling—it is a chatty, thoughtful film about familial bonds and estrangement, although it is a little ruined by a man sitting next to me who won’t stop fidgeting. I get the vaporetto back to the island, with time for a quick panini from Caffè Florian, a café on St Mark’s Square where classical music makes the perfect accompaniment for a toastie.