Quentin Tarantino will head the competition jury for this year’s Venice Film Festival, which will run from September 1st to the 11th.  Variety tells us that Tarantino will be in charge of handing out the coveted Golden Lion award at the festival after previously being a presence at the fest when he “godfathered” retrospective looks at Italian Kings of the B's in 2004 and Spaghetti Westerns in 2007

After the jump you can find out which films will be making their debuts at the festival.

A couple of critically-adored directors will be debuting their latest films at the festival this year.  I’m just going to list them each followed by whatever info we know about them so far.

Somewhere directed by Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation):

“Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a bad-boy A-List actor stumbling through a life of excess while living at Hollywood’s legendary Chateau Marmont Hotel.  His days are a haze of drinks, girls, fast cars and fawning fans.  Cocooned in this celebrity-induced artificial world, Johnny has lost all sense of his true self.  Until, that is, his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) unexpectedly shows up and unwittingly begins to anchor him.  Johnny’s fragile connection to real life slowly revives in her presence. So when the time comes fro Cleo to leave, his sense of loss is palpable, but the gift of hope she has also brought him leads to a beautiful, poetic denouement imbued with all of Coppola’s remarkable powers to conjure mood and atmosphere.”

Road to Nowhere directed by Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) - The first film from Hellman in over 20 years will star Shannyn Sossamon, Dominique Swain, and will be about “A young filmmaker who gets wrapped up in a crime while shooting his new project on location.”

Miral directed by Julian Schnabel - This will be Schnabel’s follow up to 2007’s amazing Diving Bell and the Butterfly and will star Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto as “as a refugee camp teacher in postwar Jerusalem.”

Potiche directed by Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool) - The film stars Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu and IonCinema has found a plot synopsis for the film:

“Adapted by the director from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy’s eponymous play, Potiche is set in a French bourgeois province in 1977. Suzanne (Deneuve) is the submissive wife of rich industrialist Robert Pujol (Luchini), who runs his umbrella factory with an iron hand and turns out to be just as nasty and tyrannical with his workers as he is with his mistress (Viard), children (Renier and Godrèche) and “trophy” wife. After the workers go on strike and hold Robert captive, Suzanne ends up managing the factory, instead of her husband, who is disowned by the staff. Distressed and in poor health, Robert goes away for a while and, to the surprise of most, Suzanne proves to be an assertive woman of action. With the help of the communist deputy, her former lover Maurice Babin (Depardieu), she puts an end to the strike, gets the factory running again and improves the employees’ working conditions. But when Robert returns from his trip in good health, the situation gets complicated.”