Professor Ramin Bahrani to Serve on Jury of 2018 Venice Film Festival

Associate Film Professor and Columbia College alumnus Ramin Bahrani CC '96 will serve on the international jury for the eighth-annual Luigi De Laurentiis Venice Award for a Debut Film – Lion of the Future award, a prize that recognizes the best feature-length film from across all sections in this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Bahrani “will chair this panel with Italian actress Carolina Crescentini, Tunisian director and screenwriter Kaouther Ben Hania, Japanese curator and artistic director Hayashi Kanako and Argentinian director Gastòn Solnicki,” according to Deadline. The prize winner will receive $100,000 USD, to be divided between the director and the producer. In 2017, the Luigi De Laurentiis award went to the film, Custody, directed by Xavier Legrand, and in 2016, The Last of Us, directed by Ala Eddine Slim.

The Venice Film Festival’s mission is “to raise awareness and promote international cinema in all its forms as art, entertainment and as an industry, in a spirit of freedom and dialogue. The Festival also organizes retrospectives and tributes to major figures as a contribution towards a better understanding of the history of cinema.”

At the Festival, Bahrani’s short documentary, Blood Kin, which he directed, will premiere under the Scofini section.

Most recently, Bahrani wrote and directed the 2018 HBO film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s groundbreaking dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, which garnered a lot of attention. The adaptation portrays a futuristic world in which books are banned, and stars Michael Shannon and Michael B. Jordan. Among Bahrani’s current works-in-progress include an adaptation of Arvind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger.