Venice, Italy  - This year's Venice Film Festival aims to pack some punch, and not just because the screen's most famous boxer stands to pick up one of the awards.

Sylvester Stallone is to receive the 2009 Glory to the Filmmaker Award for a career catalogue featuring the Rocky blockbuster franchises.

It would seem an odd choice for Venice, which has a reputation for reserving most of the honours to less commercial cinema.

In fact, recent years have seen the world's oldest film festival - the inaugural edition was held in 1932 - featuring several films that went on to become major contenders for Hollywood's Oscars or even box-office hits.

These have included the likes of Brokeback Mountain, which in 2005 was bestowed with the festival's top Golden Lion prize. It later won an Academy Award for its director Ang Lee, who heads this year's jury in Venice.

The global economic slump and its negative impact on the film industry has raised concerns that this year's line-up on the Venice's Lido would be somewhat lightweight.

Not so, says festival director Marco Mueller, who described the 66th edition of the festival and his fifth at the helm, as "finally the right one."

He also fended off criticism that this year's festival selection has unjustly favoured US and European productions over those from other parts of the world.

"In the US and Europe, the economic crisis has pushed directors and producers to make films that were more 'necessary' than others, that express the spirit of their time," Mueller said.

Mueller is particularly proud of the first-ever presence in the Venice competition of hard-hitting US director, Michael Moore.

Moore's documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, reportedly an expose of Wall Street wheeling and dealing, and the US government attempts to cope with the financial market crash, comes in the wake of the worst recession since World War II.

It is generating a pre-festival buzz which has largely drowned out the praise usually reserved for glossier productions or the speculation about which Hollywood stars are likely to sparkle in Vienna.

The film is one of six US films in competition, the highest number of entries from any nation.

The US selection also includes another film that is triggering interest - A Single Man, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

It marks the first moviemaking foray by fashion designer and former Gucci-style supremo, Tom Ford, who directs and co-writes.

Twenty-three of the 24 films running in the festival's official competition and its Golden Lion top prize have so far been announced, while an additional "surprise" selection is to be unveiled September 5.

Host nation Italy's charge is lead by Giuseppe Tornatore's Baaria, which is set in his native Sicily, like his 1989 Foreign Language Academy Award-winning Cinema Paradiso.

Starring Monica Bellucci, and partly shot in Tunisia on a set made to recreate the ancient Sicilian village of Bagheria, Baaria will officially open the festival on September 2.

Asia's representatives in the race for prizes in Venice include two Chinese productions, Yi ngoi (The Accident) and Lei wangzi (Prince of Tears). Those join Japan's Tessuo The Bullet Man and Sri Lanka's Ahasin Wetei (Between Two Worlds).

An out-of competition film, billed as China's first-ever science fiction movie, Chengdu, Wo Ai Ni (Chengdu, I Love You), has been chosen to close the festival.

Stressing what he contends this year's selection in Venice has achieved, Mueller speaks of of the need for film festivals to "seek out where cinema is hidden."

That can be "in the latest horror by a auteur, but also in a first-time work from Egypt," he said, alluding to two of the festival's more niche films.

One is El Mosafer (The Traveller), starring screen veteran Omar Sharif and representing Africa's sole entry into the official competition.

The other: Survival of the Dead, is by cult zombie moviemaker, George Romero. (dpa)