Venice 2026: The Verdict

May el-Toukhy may have been the only woman director in Venice competition this year (that is, before the last-minute addition of Naza, co-directed by Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham), but the jury presided over by Maggie Gyllenhaal certainly took notice. It crowned her widely-admired drama Woman Unknown with the festival’s highest honor, the Golden Lion, as well as assigning the Best Actress Coppa Volpi award to Mathilde Arcel. The dark story of paranoia set at the end of WWII in Denmark had a buzz since its prefestival screenings.

Yet its two big wins – very rare in the festival annals—left many with a feeling of disappointment that the festival’s intense, slap-in-the-face, game-changing favorites, NAZA and DAU, were farther down on the awards list. The former documentary shocked audiences with its uncompromising revelations from anonymous Israeli intelligence officers about how cynically the Israeli military targets the people of Gaza for destruction and death. After receiving a 24-minute standing ovation at its official screening, possibly the longest in Venice’s history, it seemed particularly undervalued when it got only the Special Jury Prize to take home. DAU, a wildly imaginative, expressionistic vision of Soviet scientists working on the atomic bomb during the Cold War, twenty controversial years in the making, was recognized with the Best Director award to Ilya Khrzhanovsky.

It was a momentous year on the stage of world politics by any measure, marked by old and new wars, economic instability, and major political re-alliances. Almost every festival that took place in 2026 had to come to terms with demands they take a public stand in favor of Palestine and Ukraine, against Israel and Russia. Venice director Alberto Barbera has said he sees the festival’s role as safeguarding freedom of expression, and that it makes no sense for it to take an explicit political position. In the last few years, the Venice Film Festival has become known for its liberal attitude to programing films from any country in the world, in contrast to the controversies Berlin and Cannes always seem to get embroiled in, not to mention the many smaller festivals who have to follow national political guidelines that exclude entire countries from selection.

The most memorable films in Venice competition – and there were many intense experiences in the lot – wove their stories around social injustice, war, military dictatorship and other contemporary issues.

The understated delicacy of Lee Chang-Dong’s Possible Love, in which a poor Korean family of three who have lost their money and self-respect when a strike at their factory fails to reinstate redundant employees, is a long film that starts quietly and builds to a bewitching, transcendental conclusion. It was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize. Entirely overlooked at the awards’ distribution was Marco Bechis’s riveting Back to Buenos Aires, a relentless revisitation of Garage Olimpo, the director’s classic outcry against the military dictatorship that saw so many young Argentinians tortured and killed. The new film offers a painful catharsis to the survivors, and the audience, with Italian actor Adriano Giannini exceptionally moving.

While Naza rightly earned the biggest headlines, the wider Venice program delivered a bumper haul of superior documentaries with strong political themes. Musk, Alex Gibney’s epic-length investigation into Elon Musk, mostly covered familiar ground, but landed enough sharp blows to draw legal threats from the Nazi-saluting tech tycoon himself. Spanning even more screen time, Julia Loktev’s six-hours-plus My Undesirable Friends Part II: Exile offered a riveting ensemble portrait of brave young rebel reporters forced to flee Russia after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, paying a high price emotionally and mentally for speaking truth to power.

There was also a timely political dimension to Theo Rollason’s Queer Edward II, a flashback to legendary director Derek Jarman’s angriest film, which was made against a backdrop of stormy gay rights protests. Rollason’s fascinating found-footage documentary shared the main Queer Lion prize in Venice. Meanwhile, Oscar-winner Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) shared a chillingly powerful snapshot of Trump’s America with They’re Here, a 25-minute non-fiction horror film co-directed by Rachel Lauren Mueller, about ICE agents terrorising the streets of Minneapolis,

Veteran campaigning documentary-maker Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA) was back on the Lido too with another hard-knuckled examination of workplace power politics, Union Town, which chronicles a series of recent strikes in New York City. Kudos is due to Kopple, a mere 80 years young and still fighting the good fight.

Indeed, older filmmakers were in great form in Venice this year. Making a rare return to drama, the 84-year-old Werner Herzog delivered one of his most boldly unhinged passion-project films in years, the surreal Irish fairy tale Bucking Fastard. Herzog also made brief cameo as himself in the latest feature by his German New Wave contemporary, 81-year-old Wim Wenders, the elegantly crafted 3D documentary From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor.

Still a formidable screen queen at 93, Ellen Burstyn was in Venice to pick up her honorary Lifetime Achievement Golden Lion. She also had acting credits in the program, playing a 100-year-old Marilyn Monroe in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s quirky short Flesh Impact, and a mischievous matriarch taking a wild road trip in Kornél Mundruczó’s patchy but warm-hearted odd-couple comedy Place to Be.

By comparison, John Malkovich is a mere baby at just 72, but he brought tremendous comic energy to Venice, winning the Best Actor prize for his full-spectrum performance as a rogue CIA agent in Martin McDonagh’s darkly hilarious Wild Horse Nine. This late-career return to peak form by Malkovich is already being widely tipped as a surefire Oscar contender.

Outside of the competitive sections, the audience cast its vote in the Spotlight sidebar, the only part of the Official Selection where the public gets to pick a winner. Their choice fell upon the Romanian film I Matter, the feature directorial debut of actress Alina Serban (a regular of Radu Jude). Viewers were drawn to the story of Rebeca, a Roma teenager whose life is about to change as she gets ready for her 18th birthday and leaving the orphanage where she grew up. A reworking of Serban’s short of the same name from 2021, it’s a solid character study and further evidence of the strength of contemporary Romanian cinema, with the award as a precursor to wider global exposure in theaters.

Among the questions that loomed large over the selection was one about the Italian films in the program: too many, perhaps? Alberto Barbera was quick to point out it was one fewer than 2025, but that doesn’t change the fact the general reaction on the Lido suggested a few of the festival regulars (Gianni Amelio among them) could have sat this one out. Particularly curious was the response to Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, widely regarded in the critics’ polls as a nadir of the competition. Not too long ago, critics and cinephiles had blasted Italy’s Ministry of Culture for refusing to support a project based on Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay; now, they were cheerfully tearing down that very film, implicitly confirming the ministry committee may have had a point.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s jury was certainly not impressed by the Italian crop, as this was one of the rare editions where the national contenders were completely left out of the official awards. Better results took place in the Orizzonti competition, where Tommaso Landucci’s Children of the Monkey (the affecting story of a father who, having to deal with a disabled child, starts spending more time with his nephew) won Best Screenplay and Best Actor, the latter being a fitting achievement for a career-best performance by Riccardo Scamarcio, who boldly casts aside his usual brooding persona in favor of something more vulnerable and raw.