Venice Gives Its Prizes, and Keeps Its Receipts

The Venice Film Festival has closed, and the foreign coverage has done what it always does: awarded its verdicts. The New York Times reports that the Golden Lion went to 'Woman Unknown', a Danish drama directed by May el-Toukhy; Al Jazeera notes that 'NAZA', a documentary on Gaza, took the Special Jury Prize; the Guardian found Toni Servillo bringing gravitas to a Neapolitan ghost story and a family Christmas boiling over into stereotype. For a fortnight each September, the world's film critics write about Venice as a place of screens and red carpets, and the city obliges.

It is worth setting that coverage beside another item from the same week. The Guardian observed that much of Europe already levies a tourist tax, and that for Italy's cash-strapped municipalities it has proved a quiet boon — a nightly charge absorbed into hotel bills and, increasingly, into the budgets of cities that must maintain themselves for visitors. The juxtaposition is not accidental. The festival and the levy are two expressions of the same fact: Venice is a place the world comes to, and the world's arrival has a cost that someone must meet.

The foreign press is more comfortable with the first story than the second. A prize is a clean narrative; a levy is an accounting question, and accounting is dull. Yet the levy is where the real argument sits — how much a city may charge for the privilege of visiting it, who pays, and whether the money returns to the neighbourhoods that empty out each evening when the day-trippers leave. The Guardian's framing, that the tax is 'a nice little earner', is friendly but slightly evasive. It is not a windfall. It is a partial recovery of an expense that mass tourism imposes and that residents, in the end, subsidise.

We do not begrudge Venice its fortnight of cinema. A festival that draws the world's attention is a form of soft power, and Italy has few assets more durable than its capacity to be looked at. But the two stories belong together, and the international press tends to run them apart: the glamour in the culture pages, the tax in the business section, the residents nowhere in particular. A city that is simultaneously a stage and a household cannot be reported in two separate columns. It is one place, with one ledger, and the prizes do not balance it.