Venice film festival has embraced a curious 30-year tradition: a public "feedback wall" (Ridateci i soldi, or "Give us our money back") erected outside the Palazzo del Cinema, where visitors are encouraged to scrawl scathing reviews of the films and the festival itself. Far from suppressing the criticism, festival director Alberto Barbera personally awards a prize each year to the wall's most brutal complaint, turning it into a deliberate counterweight to the hype and gushing reviews that typically surround major film festivals.

This year's complaints ranged from gripes about rising badge, taxi and accommodation costs to pointed attacks on individual films, including the controversial DAU, Paul Schrader's The Basics of Philosophy, and several Italian titles such as Luca Guadagnino's seven-hour documentary Joie de Vivre. The tradition was started in the late 1990s by former TV presenter Gianni Ippoliti, who acts as its one-man jury, in protest at overly enthusiastic reviewing; critics say the practice reflects Italian audiences' unusually vocal, interactive relationship with cinema compared with more restrained festivals like Cannes or Berlin.