Venice 2026 Lineups

Barbera tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough that while Fincher’s film will simply not be ready in time for the festival’s eighty-third edition (September 2 through 12), Warner Bros. has decided to release Digger “at the beginning of October, skipping all the festivals. That their marketing strategy. There was no room to discuss it with them . . . If the big Hollywood movies decide to skip the festivals, we will work to improve our role in promoting independent films, new talents, and new filmmakers—auteur cinema from around the world. Which is part of our mission and something we’ve always done. Maybe we will just be doing more of that.”

Another more minor surprise is the renaming of the Out of Competition section. It’s now Venice Open, and the bigger surprise here is how very strong the nonfiction slice of this program is. Let’s have a look.

As previously announced, Danny Boyle’s Ink, starring Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdock, will open this year’s edition. One of the most anticipated titles set to compete for the Golden Lion is Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, featuring an outstanding cast—Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine), Sul Kyung-gu (Oasis), Zo In-sung (Escape from Mogadishu), and Cho Yeo-jeong (Parasite)—in what Toronto calls a “gripping tale of two couples playing games with themselves and one another.”

Five of the twenty films lined up for the competition come from Italian directors, including Andrea Pallaoro, who has adapted Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay, The Echo Chamber. “Working closely with Bertolucci’s cowriters Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi,” writes Melanie Goodfellow at the top of her interview with the filmmaker for Deadline, “Pallaoro has made the tale of love, longing, absence, possession, and obsession his own with the help of lead cast Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli, and Susan Sarandon.”

Here we need to skip ahead just a moment to the previously mentioned Venice Open program. Luca Guadagnino calls his seven-and-a-half-hour documentary Joie de vivre a “love letter” to Bertolucci. Guadagnino aims to take a good long look at the art and life of the writer and director who died in 2018.

Danish Egyptian director May El-Toukhy is the only woman with a film in competition, and as it happens, the title is Woman Unknown. In 2019, El-Toukhy’s Queen of Hearts—which Catherine Breillat remade in 2023 as Last Summer—won an Audience Award at Sundance. The new film focuses on a nanny set to marry a wealthy widower when her past as a lover of a German soldier during the Second World War threatens to catch up with her.

Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard stars Kate and Rooney Mara as sisters. “We’re playing total equals who speak in unison and do everything the same,” Kate Mara told Brian Davids in the Hollywood Reporter last summer. “We could have never imagined finding two roles in a film where we’re literally equals in so many ways, and it was just so perfect.”

The latest iteration of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s extraordinarily ambitious Dau project is a feature running three and a half hours. Loosely based on the life of Soviet physicist Lev Landau and launched twenty years ago on what grew to become the largest shooting location in Europe, Dau was first—and for many years—an on-set living experience for its sprawling cast and crew that has reminded many of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008). Eventually, Dau spawned several features, three television series, and a few immersive installations.

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, a portrait of Allen Nelson, a Black veteran of the Vietnam War, is the latest film from Shinya Tsukamoto, the director of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and a cast member in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose Sheep in the Box premiered in competition in Cannes, is now competing in Venice with Look Back, the story of two friends who dream of becoming manga artists.

John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, and Parker Posey star in Wild Horse Nine, Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). Robert Pattinson plays To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime.

Florian Zeller’s Bunker, the story of an architect hired by a filthy rich tech bro to build a survivalist bunker, stars Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Stephen Graham, Paul Dano, and Patrick Schwarzenegger. Company, the third feature written and directed by Casey Affleck, features Nick Nolte, Ben Mendelsohn, and Scoot McNairy in a narrative that weaves together three timelines.

Fictional features premiering out of competition include the closing-night film, Giovanni Veronesi’s Dio ride, and Paul Schrader’s The Basics of Philosophy, starring Jack Huston as a professor working on a book about Spinoza when the victim of one of his past transgressions reappears in his life. Ellen Burstyn and Taika Waititi star in Kornél Mundruczó’s Place to Be as unlikely friends taking a racing pigeon from Chicago to New York. And the cast of Lav Diaz’s Let Us Through, Dear Ancestors, set in the Philippines in the seventeenth century, features filmmaker Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca).

Again, though, the main attractions of the Open program are the nonfiction features. My Undesirable Friends: Part II—Exile is Julia Loktev’s anxiously awaited follow-up to 2024’s Last Air in Moscow. Loktev catches up with the independent Russian journalists who were subjected to government surveillance and harassment during the buildup to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mariano Llinás (La flor) has directed the 330-minute Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges, which tackles not only the writer’s life and work but also a century of literature and history. Takashi Miike, too, will take a deep dive in Shumei: The Living Legacy of Kabuki. Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium is a three-hour journey through the Soviet Union of the 1970s via archival footage. Wim Wenders will be in Venice with From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor.

Union Town will complete a trilogy on labor rights that Barbara Kopple began with Harlan County USA (1976) and American Dream (1990). Theo Rollason will tell the story of the making of Derek Jarman’s 1991 reimagining of 1594 play by Christopher Marlowe in Queer Edward II. Dust will be the eleventh film in Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker series. Alex Gibney’s Musk, a “definitive and unvarnished examination” of the world’s first trillionaire, runs nearly four hours. And Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, the codirectors of The Truffle Hunters (2020) and Gaucho Gaucho (2024), are back with Burgundy.

Una storia, the first feature directed by Italian actor Anna Foglietta, will open the Orizzonti program. The film centers on parents whose lives seem suddenly off-kilter when their daughter leaves home. Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, Procession) will bring Too Much Sugar, in which a family’s members turn to cinema to help reconstruct their past.

Venice Spotlight will offer the latest feature directed by Gael García Bernal. In Hombre al agua, Camilo, a Cuban lifeguard, saves Abel, a Mexican businessman, from drowning. Abel brings Camilo to Mexico—and to his daughter, whom Camilo marries before discovering that all of this grateful beneficence is part of Abel’s Machiavellian plan.

Daniel Zvereff’s Moonfish is one of four features slated to premiere in the Biennale College Cinema program. Featuring the voices of Morgan Spector and Lucy Liu, Moonfish is the animated tale of a grieving astronaut losing his grip on reality.

Some pretty exciting news seems to have slipped under the radar: Claire Denis directs Kim Gordon and Suzanne Lindon in Avec Kim, the next short film in the ongoing series Miu Miu Women’s Tales. Since 2012, the fashion brand has premiered all of these Tales—and there are now more than thirty of them—at the Giornate degli Autori, or Venice Days. The independent program will also screen the latest film in the series, Mona Fastvold’s Discipline.

The twenty-third Venice Days will be dedicated to the memory of its founder, Giorgio Gosetti, who passed away in March. My Notes on Mars, Lili Horvát’s follow-up to Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2020) and her first feature in English, will open this year’s edition. Mackenzie Davis stars as a scientist who goes missing during a hiking trip with her husband (Rupert Friend) and some friends. On the day of her memorial service, she reappears but has no memory of what’s happened to her.

The other nine films in competition include the twenty-fifth feature from Robert Guédiguian, A Woman Today, the story of a high-flying thirty-five-year-old whose life is upended when she’s attacked by a coworker. Mia Wasikowska stars in Kuba Dorabialski’s Agata the Writer as a Polish-Australian novelist who heads to Sarajevo to write a war novel. Damilola Orimogunje’s Dear Ajayi, in which two estranged sisters must learn to live together while caring for their paralyzed mother, will be the first Nigerian film to premiere in the Venice Days competition.

Venice Nights, the sidebar’s sidebar, will present nine new Italian features, and five more films will screen as Special Events. Premiering out of competition and closing this year’s edition will be Léa Domenach’s Man’s Skin, starring Catherine Deneuve, Claire Pommet, and Karin Viard. Set in 1480, the adaptation of Hubert and Zanzim’s popular graphic novel tells the story of a princess doomed to marry a vulgar army official until her godmother gives her a mysterious skin that will allow her to appear as a man.

Presenting the lineup of debut features for the forty-first Settimana Internazionale della Critica, or Venice Critics’ Week, artistic director Beatrice Fiorentino writes that “deciding which films to showcase and which to exclude” is a “political” act. “That does not mean succumbing to content-driven narratives,” adds Fiorentino. “Linguistic, formal, artistic research will always be our priority. But as Wim Wenders mentioned in his 1991 [book] The Logic of Images—several years ahead of his famous about-turn at the last Berlinale—‘every film is political.’”

This year’s Critics’ Week will open and close with Italian films premiering out of competition. Marco Santi’s The Great Giaffa, in which an ordinary man imagines himself to be a charismatic performer, reminds Fiorentino of Luigi Pirandello, and Roan Johnson and Davide Pavanello’s Rider tells the love story between a food delivery cyclist and a well-to-do woman in contemporary Milan. The seven features in competition come from Colombia, Tunisia, Brazil, Greece, France, and China, while all nine short films—seven of them competing—are Italian.