Venice 2026 Talking Points: Where Are The Studios? Will There Be Stars? Has The 50-50 Gender Equality Drive Run Out Of Steam?

The Venice Film Festival unveiled the lineup for its 83rd edition at a news conference Thursday in the ornate historical archive of parent body La Biennale. We have another six weeks to pore over the details of the unveiled films ahead of the festival’s opening on September 2, but here are some first talking points to emerge out of this year’s selection.

Where are the studios?

In a trend seen across European festivals this year, apart from France’s animation-focused Annecy, the studios largely are absent from Venice. Warner Bros’ big fall titles — Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger starring Tom Cruise and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three – have sidestepped the Lido, even though the talents involved have long affiliations with the festival. Netflix, which has had a major presence in recent years, dashed hopes of a Lido splash for David Fincher’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth and its cast led by Brad Pitt. It is not entirely absent, however, thanks to Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love in competition. It also recently acquired U.S. and Latin American distribution for opening film Ink and helped fund the restoration of pre-opening film Deadly Sweet. Disney is in attendance via Searchlight’s Wild Horse Nine, National Geographic Documentary Films-backed Venice Immersive selected Everest: the first ascent; ESPN documentary Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing in the Venezia Spotlight sidebar, and Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, which will stream on Disney+. TIFF appears to have fared better this year, securing studio and streamer pictures such as Amazon MGM Studios’ Sylvester Stallone biopic I Play Rocky and Apple TV-backed opening-night film Being Heumann from CODA‘s Siân Heder.

Big-name stars

The notoriously boisterous Italian paparazzi will still see star action. High-profile names sprinkled throughout this year’s lineup include Robert Pattinson, fresh off The Odyssey release, who will travel to the Lido with Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, as both star and producer on the film inspired by the NBC program To Catch a Predator and its host Chris Hansen. Other stars due to hit the Lido include Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, who lead Florian Zeller’s Bunker; Rooney and Kate Mara and Orlando Bloom in Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard; and Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon in The Echo Chamber. Russell Crowe is also expected to touch down with his documentary What Love Builds. Venice Film Festival head Alberto Barbera also promised that Britpop rockers Noel and Liam Gallagher will make an appearance for Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s documentary Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger about their recent reunion tour. Outside of the selection, George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn will hit the red carpet as the recipients of the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, and Maggie Gyllenhaal attends as head of the jury.

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Gender parity takes a hit

At Venice’s 2018 edition, jury president Guillermo del Toro called on the festival to aim for a 50-50 gender split by 2020 in the main competition after just one female-directed film featured among the 21 Golden Lion contenders. In the interim, it looked like the festival was moving in that direction. There were Golden Lions for Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), Audrey Diwan’s Happening (2021) and Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), while last year saw six high-profile female-directed pictures in competition led by Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab and Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. This year feels like a step back in time with Danish-Egyptian director May-el Toukhy the only woman making it into the 20-picture competition, with post-World War II drama Woman Unknown. Has the 50-50 movement run out of steam?

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Guadagnino returns to Venice but not with ‘Artificial’

We told you earlier this month that Luca Guadagnino would not be going the fall festival route with his OpenAI feature Artificial following its much-talked-about acquisition by Neon. But the Italian filmmaker will be back in the Lido nonetheless, with Joie de Vivre, his seven-hour documentary portrait of Bernardo Bertolucci. It marks Guadagnino’s second nonfiction piece on the Last Tango in Paris filmmaker following the 2013 essay film Bernardo Bertolucci, which he produced using filmed interviews given by The Last Emperor Oscar winner over the course of 50 years. Guadagnino has described Joie de Vivre as a “very personal movie” that features conversations with filmmakers across the world about Bertolucci. Discussing the film this morning, Barbera described Joie de Vivre as an “extraordinary documentary that will keep you “hooked to your chair” despite the 435-minute runtime.

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Flashpoints

In an ever-polarized world, the Venice Film Festival continues to embrace politically complex films. After its selection of Gaza drama The Voice of Hind Rajab last year, this year’s lineup revisits the Middle East conflict with Muayad Alayan’s Conversation with the Sea, about a Palestinian man caught in the crosshairs of Israeli bureaucracy; Ahmed Hassouna’s portrait of a photojournalist in Gaza, Citizen Osama; Israeli director Avi Mograbi’s short film Wild Asparagus, in which he embarks on a trip with Palestinian friend Ali Al-Azhari in search of the destroyed village of Saffuriyya (Safuria), home to the latter’s family prior to the 1948 Nakba; and Amos Gitai’s Road to Jericho, about the fate of Bedouin hamlet Khan El Ahmar outside of Jerusalem, which is on the verge of being wiped off the map by Israel. Outside of the selection, the festival’s parent body, the Venice Biennale, is embroiled in its own culture war with the European Union over its move to invite Russia to its Art Biennale earlier this year. The decision, seen as contravening EU sanctions imposed on Russia for its war against Ukraine, has led the bloc to pull $2.3 million worth of funding. Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco kicked off Thursday’s press conference with a strongly fiery rebuttal of the cut as well as a promise to challenge it in the courts. It’s a stand-off that looks set to run and run.