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As the Venice Film Festival approached its final weekend, the event’s director Alberto Barbera, spoke about an increase in the number of younger cinemagoers who attended the annual celebration of the silver screen.
“I’m here since 2012, and I saw the changing of the audience of the festival, which is more and more made by very young people from 16 years on, around 25, 30 years. They are passionate. They are here because they love movies,” said Barbera. “They have the same curiosity and passion that we had when we started to go to festivals 50 years ago.”
Moreover, there is a program that the festival offers to help young cinephiles to attend the festivities.
“The Biennale, 10 years ago, improved the program to support the attendance of young people. For example, we give a discount on the accreditation for a student of the Italian university, any kind of university, not only student of cinema (…) We started with 1,000 students. Now we are around 2,800 students that are attending the festival. We help them to find rooms, low-cost rooms in Venice.”
The Associated Press talked to some of these young attendees on the Venice Lido and asked them why they love cinema so much.
“During the last years, cinema became really more attractive for young people, maybe because cinema is open to more actual themes,” said 27-year-old film student Pablo Traversa, who admittedly loves going to the theater to “quit from the outside world for at least two hours.”
“I think it’s magic because you can stop thinking about other things in your everyday life and you can feel like the main characters of another story,” echoes fellow 27-year-old Domenico Gallo.
Some of the youngsters love dressing up to visit the film theater. Asia, a 22-year-old film student, remembers watching Greta Gerwig’s 2023 comedy “Barbie” dressed in theme with the movie.
“Everybody was in pink, and all the generations got mixed up, because there were older women mostly and younger girls. So, it was really lovely to see, and also it was lovely to see also like men dressing up in pink or with Barbie shorts.”
This article was provided by The Associated Press.