The world’s oldest film festival, which kicks off its 79th edition Wednesday, managed to work within Italy’s strict coronavirus restrictions to ensure the show would go on.

There are no tentpoles in the 2022 Venice line-upL: Spielberg’s semi-autobiography The Fabelmans is skipping the Lido to premiere in Toronto.

Barbera’s choices make 79th edition look like another banner year

Noah Baumbach’s opener White Noise with Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig; Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Mexican epic Bardo; Andrew Dominik’s Marylin Monroe biopic Blonde; Bones and All, which re-teams Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino with star Timothée Chalamet and Todd Field’s Cate Blanchett-starrer TÁR are just a sampling of the highlights.

Barbera spoke about bringing fans back to the Lido red carpet, controversial choices (Kim ki-duk), and optimism about Venice marking the post-COVID return of art-house cinema.

First Venice Fest since COVID restrictions lifted in Italy

We’re going back to the regular festival. There won’t be any limitations or restrictions. We’re following the guidelines from the ministry of health and at the moment the situation is under control, infections are in decline across Italy. We aren’t worried. We’ll be using the theaters to their fullest capacity. Masks won’t be required, though we’re still suggesting people should wear them if they wish.

Films starring Timothée Chalamet (Bones and All) and Harry Styles (Don’t Worry Darling) a return of screaming crowds of superfans?

We think we’re going to have at least the same amount of people attending this year as in 2018 and maybe more. We’re still receiving requests for accreditation. On the first day we opened the box office we sold 18,000 tickets in few hours. Hotels on the Lido and in Venice are fully packed. We might have some problems finding room for people because it’s almost impossible to find place to stay in town.

Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, the first Netflix film to open Venice Fest

We were the first festival to open our competition to Netflix movies with Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation in 2015 and every year we have 1-2 Netflix films in competition.

This year it’s more than usual. But it isn’t as if we have preference for Netflix. We have films from Warner Bros. [Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling] from Universal and Focus [TÁR], A24 has three films [Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, Johanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, Ti West’s out-of-competition Pearl].

Netflix has become one of the biggest production companies for quality films. They invest a lot in producing movies from the most reputable filmmakers of the moment.

This doesn’t mean that Netflix has “won the war” against the traditional system or the traditional way of distributing films in theaters. Clearly, we are in the middle of a transition. We still don’t know where this transition will lead us. The film industry is reassessing the entire system of production and distribution.

But when we select a film for the festival, the only criteria we use is the quality of the film. Netflix submitted several excellent films. We invited some of them, not all of them.

Since theaters re-opened, the big Hollywood blockbusters bounce back, like Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis?

That’s not an easy question to answer. Theaters re-opened just a few months ago. And the offering of new films, aside from the big Hollywood movies, which played very well, weren’t good enough to convince the audience to come back to the theaters. But I’m quite optimistic with this new season, and new batch of movies, that the audience will come back. They aren’t going to abandon the habit of watching films at home on platforms, but everybody knows that watching a film in theater is more rewarding experience from every point of view.

And here the role of the film festivals is quite important because the kind of promotion and exposure a festival can give arthouse film is important to create the wish of this audience to go back to theaters.

Great arthouse films disappear without festival push to support them?

That’s absolutely true. But as we come out of this, we can’t think we can go back to the old ways, to the same ways of promoting and distributing films as we did before the pandemic. Everything has changed, and we need to change how we distribute and promote films, to get audiences excited about seeing them again.

The selection process is a long one. This time longer than usual, we started in November, when usually we start in March or April. From January on we had endless flood of films, we received more than we were able to watch. When it comes to the Iranian films, we saw them, and accepted them, months before this new, more difficult situation arose for Iranian filmmakers.

The last film we picked was Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, but that was almost a month before Jafar’s arrest (in July). When we saw his movie, we immediately fell in love with it, we sent out the invitation and that was accepted immediately.

I’d like to underline that we are not politically driven in our choices. There are a lot of political films in our selection this year, like Argentina, 1985 from Santiago Mitre, or the Indonesian film Autobiography, films that are strong statements against political regimes.

But this is something that comes after we select the movie.  I know that cinema can be one of the strongest tools to reflect contemporary society. It is one of the great strengths of cinema, and can be very effective in doing so.

Politically-neutral and Russian filmmakers? three Ukrainian films, but no Russian ones.

We had very few Russian films submitted this year. A couple were interesting, but not good enough to be selected. So we didn’t have to face the difficult situation of having to decide if we should invite them or not. But again, I would repeat what was said at the opening of the Biennale art exhibition: we won’t ban an artist because of their nationality. We will not invite any person or film which is directly involved with the Russian Ministry of Culture of the Russian government.

Showing Kim Ki-duk’s Call of God, despite rape accusations?

When we saw the film, it was clear we were dealing with the last film by Kim Ki-duk. He was in a way discovered by Venice, back in 2000 with The Isle, which made him well-known arthouse filmmaker worldwide. He came back to Venice many times and won two important awards: including best director for 3-Iron in 2004, and best film in Venice Days in 2012 for One on One.

We would always look at his new movies —I’d say it was kind of fidelity to the director, kind of mutual respect and trust between the filmmaker and the festival —but they were much less interesting than this one. When Kim Ki-duk’s Estonian friends contacted me saying that there were working on completing the film that Ki-duk couldn’t finish, because he died during production, I thought we couldn’t let this opportunity pass.

We knew that he had been accused of sexual misbehavior. I don’t know the details and I’m not in a position to judge if it is true. I don’t want to make any judgment about a personal problem. I think there are a lot of people who will be interested to watch the last film that Kim Ki-duk was not able to complete. And I think it is fair enough to show it at the festival that has probably the longest, more profound relationship with the director.

I understand this kind of criticism against the festival. We had to face the same situation, for example, two years ago when we presented An Officer and a Spy from Polanski in competition.  What I said then still stands. We are not a tribunal. I’m not a judge who can make decision about the personality of a man or a woman. I am a film critic. I’m here to judge the quality of the art that is submitted to the festival.

This separation between the man and the artist is inevitable. It’s part of the history of art. We know that Italian painter Caravaggio was a murderer. But he made some of the most important masterpieces of 17th-century Italian painting. What should we do? Remove the paintings from the museums because Caravaggio was a murderer? I don’t think so.

My position is very controversial. But maybe, in a century, people will remember the films of Roman Polanski and they will forget or forgive the fact that he was accused of sexual misbehavior 40 years ago. We are not here to judge the person or the man. We are here to judge the quality of the thing he makes. Sometimes people that make good things do bad things.

Most surprising in this year’s line-up?

There are a number of highly-anticipated movies, but there are also a lot of surprising films. Every year we take risks to put a debut director in competition. We do that this year with Saint Omer from a young French filmmaker Alice Diop who comes from documentaries. It’s a very strong film. It will be one of the surprises of the festival. But there will be others. Every year I say: Don’t just go to the big movies that will be in theaters in  couple of months’ time. Try to follow your instincts, be curious and try to discover new talents. Because there will be more than one this year in Venice.