With six Luxembourg projects on display, this year’s Venice Film Festival was a lap of honour for a modest state with an outsized impact. With 1,200 professionals, a vibrant animation sector and an output of 25-30 titles per year, the Grand Duchy’s co-production-driven ecosystem is all the more remarkable for its relative youth and the speed of its rise.

“Thirty-five years ago, we had no professional infrastructure and no real audiovisual production,” says Guy Daleiden, director of the Luxembourg Film Fund. “We had to build everything from scratch and develop an autonomous sector with production companies and technicians who are now highly regarded worldwide.”

In the decades that followed, local daughter Vicky Krieps gave the country its biggest star, and “Mr. Hublot” directors Laurent Witz and Alexandre Espigares brought projects of their own to the Oscar stage, together following a broader blueprint to develop the live-action and animation sectors in tandem. Today, animation accounts for 40% of local activity, with live-action work rounding out the rest – while non-fiction outfits continue to make waves.

Wang Bing’s “Youth (Homecoming)” premiered in Venice and is the culmination of what Daleiden calls “a historic grand slam” that saw the series’ previous two installments, “Youth (Spring)” and “Youth (Hard Times),” play at Cannes and Locarno, respectively. Festival accolades aside, the full 10.5-hour dive into the sweatshops of the Middle Kingdom has also launched local producers onto a more global circuit.