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Finally, after months of anticipation and speculation, the sprawling lineup of feature films, documentaries, shorts and immersive experiences at this year's Venice International Film Festival has come into focus.
Yes, the world's oldest film festival, which runs from Sept. 2 to Sept. 12 with media/industry previews Sept. 1, again debuts notable projects from prominent filmmakers from across the world, some of them likely awards-season contenders. Danny Boyle, Martin McDonagh, Werner Herzog, Ali Asgar, and Florian Zeller are among the notable directors with projects in competition.
Of the 20 films in competition, 12 are debuting solely in Venice, while another eight will also appear at the Toronto International Festival, which runs Sept. 5 to Sept. 15. Along with the smaller and more remote Telluride (Colorado) festival, the three Labor Day-adjacent fests semi-officially kick off the awards season while spotlighting other notable pictures that will get critical and cinephile attention the next several months.
Venice festival artistic director Alberto Barbera told Screen Daily one of this year's highlights is a film directed by and starring beloved Italian comedian Nanni Moretti (It Will Happen Tonight/Succedera Questa Notte). The highly personal “love melodrama†is Moretti's first Venice appearance in 37 years.
Wild Horse Nine, written and directed by Oscar winner Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; The Banshees of Inisherin) promises another pitch-black comedic take, this time set in the days before the 1973 CIA-assisted coup that ousted Chilean leader Salvador Allende.
Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich play CIA officers dispatched to remote Easter Island by their station chief, played by Steve Buscemi. Complications ensue. The cast also includes Tom Waits and indie queen Parker Posey.
As with Wild Horse Nine, multiple projects, both in and out of competition, focus on the stories of people living in or after autocratic or murderous regimes, from Nazi Germany (Kvinde Ukendt/Woman Unknown) and the Soviet Union (Dau) to Iran (Kami Nour) and junta-era Argentina (Ritorno a Buenos Aires).
Sometimes the oppression is more personal, as in Il Fuoco Che Ti Port Dentro, where Antonio's larger-than-life mother visits at Christmas and sets off a showdown with her successful son.
Barbera also tabbed Look Back by Hirozaku Koreeda, about two teen girls bonding over their love of creating manga, and Mr. Nelson Did You Kill People? by Shinya Tsukamoto, about a returning Black Vietnam War veteran, as particularly noteworthy competition projects.
Two competition films look at the world of media. Another Oscar winner, Danny Boyle, has adapted James Graham's Ink, a play about Rupert Murdoch's 1969 acquisition of British newspaper The Sun, and its transformation into the country's most influential and outrageous tabloid.
And Lance Oppenheim's Primetime tracks Chris Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson in what's already being touted as an edgy and noteworthy performance, as host of pedophile-hunting reality show To Catch a Predator as he “sets out to make television history.†Anna Faris, Merrit Wever (Nurse Jackie) and singer Phoebe Bridgers co-star.
Many will be intrigued by Florian Zeller's latest, featuring real-life couple Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, about an architect building a survivalist bunker for a billionaire and his wife, who questions his involvement. It follows Zeller's Oscar-winning screenplay for The Father.
Similarly, the peripatetic Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man) has Bucking Fastard, featuring the Mara sisters playing siblings who speak in unison and share each other dreams. As often happens with the wide-ranging Herzog, it promises to be a distinctive conversation starter.
But the competition for the Golden Lion and the festival's other awards is only the start of Venice's wide-ranging embrace of the art of cinema in its many manifestations.
Numerous other features not in competition include Oscar winner Paul Schrader's latest directing project, The Basics of Philosophy, exploring his usual concerns of guilt and repression involving older male protagonists.
The documentary section is particularly notable, with high-profile films from Wim Wenders, Alex Gibney, Barbara Kopple, Julia Loktev and even Russell Crowe.
The “Films on Films†section includes Oscar nominee Luca Guadagnino's seven-hour “love letter†to the great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, and Nino, Walter Fasano's appreciation of Italian film-score composer Nino Rota, perhaps best known for his Fellini collaborations.
As part of the festival's unique intersection with the surrounding Biennale Arte, the six-month-long biannual celebration of art from around the world, a separate festival section will feature about 20 boundary-pushing immersive and spatial-video projects, and a retrospective Best Of set of older projects.
Among the newer projects is the world premiere of Out of the Ashes, featuring spatial-video footage from Los Angeles' devastating 2025 Pacific Palisades and Eaton Canyon fires. Co-director Rory Mitchell is among the many thousands who lost homes in the fires. His co-director is Dr. Anna Maria ‘Nonny' de la Pena, founding director of Arizona State University's Narrative and Emerging Media program.
Other notable immersive projects look at David Bowie, and reconstruct the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest. A separate documentary about more recent Everest climbers is also on display this year.
Another Los Angeles-based group, the Ferryman Collective, will be represented for the fourth year in the immersive pavilion, which is held on a small island just off-shore of the Lido, the long, barrier island of beaches and theaters that encloses the lagoon, hosts the festival, and protects the main city of Venice from the Adriatic Sea.
Ferryman Collective's co-founder, Taipei-based Screaming Color (aka Christopher Lane Davis), will have his A Wonderful Thing to Realize featured as part of the festival's Best Of retrospective.
Ferryman co-founders Deirdre Lyons and Chuck Butchko won't again have their hybrid live-theater/immersive experience Uncanny Alley A New Day at the festival this year, but they are vying for an interactive Emmy in TV Academy voting that began Monday.
The festival celebrates film in many other ways, too.
The festival's lineup of feature-length documentaries is particularly strong, including Oscar winner (Taxi to the Dark Side) Alex Gibney's Musk, about the world's first trillionaire. The four-hour project promises a deep dive on the world's richest man, who might also be one of its most divisive.
Other notable docs include Wim Wenders' From Inside Out, about architect Peter Zumthor; two-time Oscar winner (Harlan County U.S.A.) Barbara Kopple's latest, Union Town; and Julia Loktev's My Undesirable Friends Pt. II, her sequel about Russian independent journalists trying to work and survive under Vladimir Putin's repressive thumb.
Sophie Fiennes (of that Fiennes clan) is directing her third deep-thoughts collaboration with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert's Guide to Utopias. The pair previously worked on similarly titled explorations of “cinema†and “ideology.â€
Maggie Gyllenhaal, president this year of the festival jury, also will debut her latest directorial project, the short film Flesh Impact, starring Ellen Burstyn, Dakota Johnson and Peter Skarsgaard.
Other notable competition documentaries look at the quintessential 1990s UK band/fratricidal brother act Oasis; the Japanese dramatic art of kabuki, Nobel-winning author Jorge Luis Borges; and Russell Crowe's What Love Builds.
Wine lovers may want to take a sip of Burgundy, Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw's documentary about life in the eponymous French wine-growing region.
And George Clooney, a long-time/part-time resident of Italy in Lake Como who has had several Venice debuts in the past, will be honored with a lifetime achievement award.
This year's feature lineup was culled from nearly 2,000 entries, winnowed over seven months to just a few dozen features, shorts, and other programming.
The lineup has some holes, Barbera acknowledged.
Barbera blamed the lack of studio projects this year substantially on timing, as many much-awaited projects are still winding through post-production, and just aren't ready to be seen by critics and the public.
But the shift of some major projects from traditional awards launches at Venice or the other fall festivals also marks a shift in thinking by Hollywood marketers, Barbera acknowledged. Some marketing teams are emphasizing initiatives using online creators to help launch projects for specific target audiences.
How that plays out will be one of the big questions of this year's awards season. This year's massive success of dirt-cheap, online-spawned horror features Iron Lung, Obsession and Backrooms have certainly encouraged many Hollywood studio execs to go looking for the next creator-led home run.
Barbera attributed the lack of female-led feature projects in competition this year to a broader issue for the film industry, with not enough top-level projects getting female directors. He did note that 45 percent of the festival's non-competition projects, from shorts to features to documentaries, are directed by women.
