Venice Opened This Week — 94 Years Ago, the First Festival Was Held on a Hotel Terrace, Not in a Theater — Woody Magazine, Sept. 4, 2026

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Venice Opened This Week — 94 Years Ago, the First Festival Was Held on a Hotel Terrace, Not in a Theater — Woody Magazine, Sept. 4, 2026
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Sept. 4, 2026 (Fri.)
Film

Venice Opened This Week — 94 Years Ago, the First Festival Was Held on a Hotel Terrace, Not in a Theater

The man who founded the world's first film festival controlled the company that owned the hotel. The regime arrived only after it worked. Every festival since has stood in the same kind of place.

Film · Sept. 4, 2026
In Three Lines
  1. On the night of August 6, 1932, the first international film festival began on the terrace of the Hotel Excelsior on the Venice Lido with a screening of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
  2. Count Giuseppe Volpi, the Biennale president who created it, held a controlling stake in the hotel company that owned the Excelsior. The Lido beach itself was that company's product, built up since 1906.
  3. Mussolini did not invent the festival for propaganda. The regime moved in only after the second edition succeeded, and its meddling is what produced Cannes in 1938.

The 83rd Venice Film Festival is under way on the Lido, the long barrier island across the lagoon from the city. It opened Wednesday with Danny Boyle's "Ink," and twenty films will compete for the Golden Lion through September 12. Telluride opens today in the Colorado mountains. Toronto follows next Thursday. People in the business call these ten days the fall festival season.

We know what a festival looks like. A red carpet, a jury, a trophy, a director thanking the crowd. It is easy to see the whole thing as art's annual accounting, the place where the year's best films get sorted. That reading is fair. But open the ledger of the first edition, ninety-four years ago, and there is one more name in it. Not a studio. Not a government. A hotel company.

August 6, 1932, 9:15 p.m.

A screen went up on the terrace of the Hotel Excelsior. The first picture was Rouben Mamoulian's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and when it ended the evening moved on to a ball inside the hotel. That was opening night of the world's first international film festival. There was no theater. There was no screening room. Twenty-five features from nine countries ran on that terrace through August 21, and about 25,000 people came to watch. No prizes were given. The audience voted on its favorites.

Why a hotel? The answer is the man who organized it.

Count Volpi had a second job title

Giuseppe Volpi was a Venetian businessman. He founded a power company, built a port, and served as Mussolini's finance minister. At the end of 1929 he became president of the newly reorganized Venice Biennale, the art exhibition that had run since 1895. He added music, theater, and film to it. The film part became the festival of 1932.

But Volpi held another position, and this one matters more. He was the controlling shareholder of CIGA, the Italian Grand Hotels Company, founded in 1906. Its flagship property was the Excelsior on the Lido. So the first festival was staged by the man who controlled a hotel company, on the terrace of his own hotel. The sponsorship money came from Volpi and his CIGA associates.

The company built the beach first

It goes one step further. The Lido as a resort was itself the company's product. At the turn of the century the island was little more than a sandbar. CIGA formed in 1906 and opened the Excelsior in July 1908, a huge Moorish-style building whose opening party drew 3,000 invited guests. Next door stood the Hotel des Bains, open since 1900, the hotel where Thomas Mann set "Death in Venice." With the two of them, the Lido became the summer beach of Europe's rich.

Volpi kept adding to it. In 1930 he built a golf course. In 1932 he added a festival. Put the dates in a row: company, 1906; hotel, 1908; golf course, 1930; film festival, 1932. Seen from that row, the festival looks less like an art event and more like the last amenity the hotel installed.

A grand hotel keeps a pianist in the lobby. The hotel is not selling music. It is selling rooms. The piano is there so that guests sit down and stay. For Volpi, film was the piano. Italy's national biographical dictionary puts it plainly: the festival drew the major studios to Venice and drove a large expansion of the tourist trade.

Volpi never sold films. He sold rooms. The films were the piano in the lobby.

The Mussolini story

Here is the version most of us have heard: Mussolini created the festival as a showcase for fascism. Volpi was his minister, and the top prize was called the Mussolini Cup, so the story holds together. The record says otherwise. According to Roderick Conway Morris, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Volpi sought Mussolini's endorsement and was refused. The dictator took no part in the 1932 festival and did not attend. Contemporary photographs show no black shirts.

The second edition, in 1934, drew nineteen countries and 300 accredited journalists. It was the first with a prize, and the prize was named the Mussolini Cup. But there was no jury. The winners were chosen by the president of the Biennale after consulting experts and audiences. The president was Volpi. The regime itself came in only afterward. That September it created a department to control Italian cinema, and from 1935 the festival ran every year.

So the order runs like this. The hotel company built it first. The regime came in once it worked.

1938: a rival hotel hires its own pianist

The regime's meddling split the festival in two. In 1938 the Mussolini Cup went jointly to Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia," Hitler's film of the Berlin Games, and to "Luciano Serra, Pilot," an Italian air force picture. By the Cannes festival's own account, the jury had unanimously chosen an American film. The French, British, and American jurors walked out. On May 31, 1939, France picked Cannes as the site of a rival festival, opening September 1, timed to run head to head with Venice. Germany invaded Poland that morning and Cannes never opened. The first Cannes festival finally ran on September 20, 1946.

Now look at where Cannes is. It is a beach resort. The first festival was held in the municipal casino. When the French government approved the relaunch in 1946, the stated purpose was to bring tourists back to the Riviera. The people who left Venice over art chose, for their new home, not a theater but a beach with a casino.

Sept. 20, 1946
Opening day of the first Cannes Film Festival. The venue was the city casino, not a movie theater.

Why they all crowd into the same ten days

Festivals multiplied after that. Their addresses did not change. Venice still opens in late August or early September: August 30 in 2023, August 28 in 2024, August 27 in 2025, September 2 this year. Telluride runs over Labor Day weekend in a Colorado ski town. Toronto starts the week after. As more of the films first shown in these ten days went on to the spring awards, the three cities settled into sharing the same stretch of calendar. Where the films gather is still where the visitors sleep.

Volpi died in 1947. The Mussolini Cup was last awarded in 1942 and then vanished. The acting prizes at Venice, however, are still called the Volpi Cup. Which of the two names survived is the end of this story.

The Last Word

The world's first film festival was built not by a government that loved cinema but by a businessman who owned a hotel. The regime arrived after it worked, and when the regime spoiled it, a rival appeared. The rival set up on a beach too. Film festivals have stood, from the first night, in towns that sell beds. They still do.

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