[People attending a screening]
Alberto Barbera (interview): “Definitely. 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. They have the same curiosity and passion that we had when we started to go to festivals 50 years ago. 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, of course, and there is an increase of students attending the festival. 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, in campus or in (unclear) or whatever, and this is a very appreciated problem. But apart from the university students, as you see, there is a lot of young people attending the festival. I don’t know where they find the funds and the money to pay because Venice is a very expensive city, but there are more and more young people attending the festivals with a lot of curiosity, a lot of passion for films.”
[People attending a screening]
Alberto Barbera (interview): “I think they start to be fed up with this kind of consuming time on social, on internet or whatever. The experience of watching a film in a theater with hundreds of thousands of people is so rewarding that I think that they are coming back to what it was for us the most important experience in our life.”
Pablo Traversa (interview): “During the last years, cinema became really more attractive for young people maybe because cinema is open to more actual themes.”
Asia (interview): “We’re more open to other views on things and how other people want to depict things and social themes, etc.”
Pablo Traversa (interview): “Maybe because I can quit from the outside world for at least two hours.”
Domenico Gallo (interview): “I like because it’s a passion I have since I was a child, so 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 and it’s magical, I think.”
[People attending a screening]
Alberto Barbera (interview): “I think that cinema is finally understanding that there is a new audience in theaters for films. So they are, in a way, they are trying to make films that they talk to the young audience with a new language, with new themes, with new topics and so on. And it works very well. And of course, we do, in a way, the same thing, now preparing the line-up of the festival. We’re very curious about the films that we think that could talk to a young audience and there is a lot of films that respond to these kind of intentions in the festival.”
[People attending a screening]
Asia (interview): “‘Barbie’ was really fun because everybody was in pink and there were a lot of younger, like they’re all the generations got mixed up, sorry, 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, I don’t know, it was fun to see that.”
Pablo Traversa (interview): “My favorite experiences are like matinees, watching an old movie or even a new one in the morning. So you wake up, you just go into the cinema and the first thing you do in your day is think about a movie.”
Bartakus (interview): “For sure I remember the first screening of ‘Harry Potter’ because I was like, I think I’m the same age, I’m 1996 and I remember all the things around like, you know, magic beans being sold at the cinema and stuff, so this is something like I still have in my memory.”
[People attending a screening]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.