Noah Baumbach’s ‘White Noise’ to open 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 in August, says festival director Alberto Barbera.

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.

“It is a great honor to open the 79th Venice Film Festival with ‘White Noise,’” Barbera says. “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.”

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. It’ll screen for festival goers at the Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema on Aug. 31 on the Lido.