Venice Film Festival To Open With Noah Baumbach’s Netflix Pic ‘White Noise’ Starring Adam Driver & Greta Gerwig

From Deadline

by Andreas Wiseman

The Venice Film Festival will open with the world premiere of Noah Baumbach’s Netflix drama White Noise, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

The film dramatizes a contemporary American family’s attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Based on the book by Don DeLillo, and written for the screen and directed by Baumbach, the film is produced by Baumbach, David Heyman and Uri Singer. It marks the first time a Netflix movie has opened the festival.

Also starring are Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin and Lars Edinger. The film marks Baumbach’s return to the Lido after he premiered Marriage Story at the festival in 2019.  

“It is a great honor to open the 79th Venice Film Festival with White Noise,” festival chief Alberto Barbera said today. “It was worth waiting for the certainty that the film was finished to have the pleasure to make this announcement. Adapted from the great Don DeLillo novel, 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.”

Baumbach added: “It is a truly wonderful thing to return to the Venice Film Festival and an incredible honor to have White Noise play as the opening-night film. This is a place that loves cinema so much, and it’s a thrill and a privilege to join the amazing films and filmmakers that have premiered here.”

The film will be screened Wednesday, August 31, in the Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema (Lido di Venezia), on the opening night of the 79th Venice Film Festival. Netflix has yet to set a release date.

Baumbach’s films include Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, Frances Ha, While We’re Young, Mistress America, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Marriage Story and the documentary De Palma.