Netflix to open the Venice Film Festival

Director Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise” has been selected to open the Venice International Film Festival.

Baumbach wrote and directed the film, which looks at the contemporary American family through the lens of a professor, Jack Gladney, and his fourth wife, Babette. Greta Gerwig, who has a child with Baumbach, stars alongside Adam Driver, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy and Jodie Turner-Smith.

The Netflix-produced film will be among those competing for the Golden Lion award, selected by a jury led by Julianne Moore, and a likely player in the awards season to come.

Baumbach previously debuted his film “Marriage Story” at the festival in 2019. It would go on to pick up six Oscar nominations, including best picture, and one win for Laura Dern.

For over two decades now, filmmakers have tried to adapt White Noise, Don DeLillo’s breakthrough 1985 novel. Many called it "unfilmable", with the project bouncing around between studios and streamers. Finally, someone has done it: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise is set to debut August 31 at the Venice Film Festival, making it the first-ever Netflix film to premiere there on opening night.

"It is a great honor to open the 79th Venice Film Festival with White Noise,'" festival chief Alberto Barbera said. "Adapted from the great Don DeLillo novel, Baumbach has made an original, ambitious, and compelling piece of art which plays with measure on multiple registers: dramatic, ironic, satirical. The result is a film that examines our obsessions, doubts, and fears as captured in the 1980s, yet with very clear references to contemporary reality."