Film correspondent Emma Jones said that aside from “a few teething problems” with the online reservation system, the festival went off better than she expected.

“It feels safe in there, it feels socially distanced,” she said of the venues, where one and sometimes two or three seats were left unoccupied for every seat that was reserved. “Everyone is wearing their masks.”

Jones noted that the lineup of films lacked the usual Hollywood blockbusters – think “La La Land,” and “The Shape of Water” — that in recent years have used Venice as a springboard to Oscar fame. While the festival featured films from Iran, India, Australia and beyond, it was heavily European.

“It’s a COVID lineup. This is a COVID festival. There’s no use pretending anything else,” Jones said.

But she added: “It would feel really off-note, I think, to have had a red carpet with screaming fans and celebrities walking down it and people talking about who wore what. Twenty-twenty is not the year for those kind of discussions.”

Instead, she said, Venice was a film festival that focused on the integrity of the films. The diversity of countries represented is a development that festival director Barbera has greeted with particular satisfaction.

“This is my personal reward,” he said of the lineup. “We were lucky to receive a lot of submissions from all over the world, and apart from a few missing titles from the Hollywood major film studios, most of the countries are represented in Venice and the quality of the lineup is really very high.”