General outline of the 64th Venice Film Festival

　　August 29 to September 8, 2007

　　On December 12, 2006, the Board of Directors of the Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Davide Croff, examined and approved the general outline, presented by Director Marco Müller, for the 64th Venice Film Festival, which will take place August 29 through September 8, 2007 (75 years after its first edition).

　　The number of full-length feature films in the Official Selection will once again be limited to a maximum of 60 titles, the number that corresponds to our limited number of screens.

　　The maximum number for each section will be as follows:

　　· Competition: 20 films

　　· Out of competition: 8 films

　　· Out of competition (Midnight): 5 films

　　· Horizons: 18 films

　　There will be the possibility, this year too, of adding a number of Special Events.

　　A 75th anniversary Lion

　　The Venice Film Festival celebrates its 75th anniversary. An important occasion to celebrate with a 75th anniversary Golden Lion, an exceptional prize approved by the Board of Directors, to be added to the traditional Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

　　A Retrospective on “Spaghetti Westerns”

　　As part of the Permanent activities and the projects for retrospectives, the choice for the year 2007 is to dedicate the main event in the retrospectives program to “Spaghetti Westerns”, the ideal continuation of the work begun with “The Secret History of Italian Film”, the initiative that will most effectively revitalize the project to rediscover invisible Italian film. The appeal of “spaghetti westerns”, or better, “Italian-style westerns”, forty years after the release of For a Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone, seems unabated, given the tributes that different directors such as Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Martin Scorsese, and Johnnie To have recently paid to them in their films. Spaghetti westerns are the films that have most consistently sparked the imagination of popular international film in recent decades, and have constituted one of the most important trends in “New Cinema” (and political cinema) that Italy has known.