‘Danny Boyle, please make another film about drugs’: Venice film festival’s feedback wall delivers home truths
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.
- Venice festival has a public wall for scathing audience reviews
- Director Alberto Barbera awards a prize for the harshest complaint
- Tradition, running 30 years, counters festival hype and gushing reviews
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The Venice Film Festival, held every year on the Lido in Venice, is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious film festivals, where new films premiere and are reviewed by critics and journalists from around the world. Alongside the red-carpet premieres and official reviews, the festival has run an unusual sideshow for around three decades: a public wall where visitors can pin up handwritten complaints about the films and the festival itself, rather than the usual polite praise.
The wall is overseen by Gianni Ippoliti, a former television presenter who created it as a protest against what he saw as excessive flattery in festival reviewing, and it is now given semi-official backing by festival director Alberto Barbera, who presents an annual prize for the most cutting comment. This sets it apart from other major festivals, such as Cannes or Berlin, where public criticism of this kind is less of an established fixture.
The tradition matters because it offers an unfiltered, crowd-sourced counterpoint to the carefully managed publicity and critical acclaim that usually surrounds a festival of this scale, giving ordinary attendees a visible voice alongside professional critics and giving a flavour of how audiences, rather than critics, actually responded to the films and running of the event.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Supporters see the feedback wall as a healthy, good-humoured corrective to the sycophancy that can surround major festivals, where sponsors, junkets and industry courtesy often produce inflated praise. By giving ordinary audiences an unfiltered, anonymous outlet, and having the director himself endorse and prize the sharpest gripes, Venice signals confidence that its programme can withstand honest scrutiny rather than needing to be shielded from it. Advocates also value it as a democratic, distinctly Italian tradition of vocal audience engagement, treating cinema as something to argue over passionately rather than receive passively.
The case against
Others worry that institutionalising a wall of insults, however jokily framed, coarsens critical discourse by rewarding the wittiest put-down rather than considered judgement, and risks reducing serious artistic effort – including ambitious or difficult works like a seven-hour documentary – to a punchline. They note that filmmakers and their teams often attend the festival and can be stung by having their work publicly mocked and prized for its brutality, which sits uneasily with a festival's role in nurturing and championing cinema. For this view, genuine accountability is better served by thoughtful critical review than by a curated spectacle of complaint that can shade into casual cruelty.