There is something profoundly cinematic about Venice. As you approach the city from the water, it stretches across the horizon ahead of you, a perfectly preserved architectural wonder, built miraculously on silt and sea—one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places in the world.
Unchanging and exquisite, La Serenissima resembles a movie set in more ways than one, making it the ideal home for one of the world’s most revered film festivals—the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica.
More wildly known as the Venice International Film Festival, La Mostra’s story is long. It is indeed the oldest in the history of festivals. Since 1932, guests have boarded the floating city’s boats in order to celebrate the end of summer with a touch of glamour. Ever since Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the very first film to be shown on screens at the Lido—the Venice International Film Festival has attracted great directors and stars to its bright lights. Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Franck Capra, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rosselini, Rita Hayworth, Anna Magnani, Jean Cocteau: all of them have walked the red carpet.
The pageantry of Venice has hardly waned over the years where, despite a pandemic and recent SAG-AFTRA strikes, this year’s 81st Venice Film Festival offered a truly vintage crop of A-list talents taking their turns to bathe in the popping flashes of cameramen and the minutes-long, post-screening standing ovations from adoring viewers. Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton, Angelina Jolie, Michael Keaton, Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Rami Malek, Pedro Almoldovar and Tim Burton all coming to revel in the glamour and vertigo of those great premiere nights with that additional sense of “dolcezza”
It makes sense then that Cartier, with its own long history of adorning and celebrating stars of the silver screen, has been a headline partner of La Mostra since 2021.
The artistry and allure of Cartier’s pieces have led many of film’s most iconic figures to wear them both on-and off-screen.
Audrey Hepburn was a devotee, wearing Cartier creations in her 1966 heist caper, How to Steal a Million, but also cherishing pieces of her own. Alain Delon and the actress Romy Schneider—known at times as both “les amant magnifiques” and “les amant terribles” were also admirers of the Maison. Both adored the famous Trinity ring, while Schneider was devoted to her Baignoire watch—which she wore in Jacques Deray’s 1969 thriller La Piscine. The late Delon himself was a proud owner of the classic Tank watch—along with other stars including Clark Gable, Warren Beatty and musician Duke Ellington.
From Elizabeth Taylor (who a selection of her personal pieces are now in the Cartier Collection), to the incomparable Marilyn Monroe (who famously namechecked the Maison in her musical number “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” from the 1953 comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), to Grace Kelly, Catherine Deneuve, Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothée Chalamet—the most shimmering of stars all had both an on-screen and off-screen relationship with Cartier.
But Cartier’s involvement in film hasn’t been only in adorning the larger-than-life characters and actors. Its headline support of the film festival is an important part of Cartier’s firm commitment to arts and culture in general—championing contemporary filmmaking and celebrating creativity and talent.
Starting in 2021, the Maison has bestowed the ‘Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award’ at La Mostra to a personality who has made an outstanding (and original) contribution to the contemporary film industry. The recipients have been British director Ridley Scott (2021), followed by two American director-writer-producers Walter Hill (2022), and Wes Anderson (2023). This year, the award was presented to the 86-year-old French filmmaker, Claude Lelouch.
Art has been at the centre of Cartier for more than 100 years, but at La Mostra, Cartier has made it the cement of its collaborations. More than fifteen original artistic projects in cinema have been founded for over two decades the singular ties between the Maison and the motion pictures. The filmmaker David Lynch offered The Air is on Fire to the Cartier Foundation in 2007, and even the Japanese plastic artist, actor and director Takeshi Kitano, whose foundation already exhibited his universe in 2010, presented the delirious Gosse de Peintre.
Since 2022—in partnership with the Biennale di Venezia—the Maison has co-organised a series of masterclasses on the Art and Craft of Cinema at the festival. With world-leading creative minds across various disciplines of filmmaking, the series puts the spotlight on the diversity of talent in cinema and the collaborative essence of their craft: not only the people we see on screen, but those who work behind the scenes to interpret the vision of the director.
“Cartier represents the ideal partner, loyal, ingenious, and proactive, willing to share objectives that represent for the both of us the vital essence of our respective activities,” said Alberto Barbera, the Artistic Director of the Biennale Cinema. They say that birds of the same feather flock together.
While the partnership undoubtedly delivers on a cinematic front, the collaboration with the Venice International Film Festival is also an opportunity for Cartier to celebrate beauty and creativity, starting with that of the city of Venice itself, which the Maison supports through a series of initiatives aimed at preserving the city’s living heritage and contributing to the ongoing development of its culture.
It feels fitting to leave it best said to Jean Cocteau, the French poet and filmmaker who once described Cartier as “a subtle magician who captures fragments of the moon on a thread
of sun.” Profoundly cinematic.