Easy Rider cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Hannibal star Francesca Neri are to join Venice Film Festival jury, headed by Chinese actress Gong Li.

The seven-member jury will decide the prestigious Golden Lion for best film at the festival which runs from 29 August to 8 September.

Also on the panel are Read My Lips writer-director Jacques Audiard, producer Ulrich Felsberg and Turkish director Yesim Ustaoglu.

Gong Li is heading the jury

The 69-year-old Hungarian-born Kovacs worked on American B-movies before working on the ground-breaking Easy Rider.

He established his reputation working with the cream of America's 1970s directors including Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich.

Yevtushenko - perhaps best-known for his poem Babi Yar about a 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews in Ukraine - has worked in film, including writing and directing the 1983 film Kindergarten.

Neri is a well-established star with Spanish and Italian directors, but was given her first major Hollywood role in Ridley Scott's Hannibal and also appeared in this year's Arnold Schwarzenegger picture Collateral Damage.

British directors

The festival announced last month that Gong Li would head the jury, but did not announce the full jury list until Monday.

Among the films by British directors in competition are Sam Mendes's Depression-era thriller Road to Perdition and Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things.

Stephen Daldry's hotly-anticipated The Hours, featuring Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, was pulled from the festival because of delays in post-production.

The festival will start with Frida, featuring Salma Hayek as surrealist Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

Sophia Loren will appear at her first Venice festival for 20 years, as the star in Between Strangers, directed by her son Eduardo Ponti.