VENICE 2026

Political cinema was back with a vengeance on Lido screens, hurling an intense reality check at the complacent.

May el-Toukhy’s dark period piece ‘Woman Unknown’, set at the end of WWII in Denmark, took home the Venice Golden Lion, while protagonist Mathilde Arcel carried off the best actress award.

Chinese writer-director Michelle Zhou draws on events from her own life in her elegantly filmed, emotionally charged, queer coming-out drama ‘Big Little Things’.

Fifty years after the events recounted in ‘Garage Olimpo’, Marco Bechis’s blood-curdling exposé of torture and murder in Argentina at the hands of a brutal military dictatorship, ‘Back to Buenos Aires’ picks up the shattered pieces of the survivors in an equally dark and intense work.

Ali Asgari’s delicate exploration of living and suffering provides a viewpoint from today’s Iran looking out, in his spot-on snapshot of life in times of uncertainy, ‘A Bit of Light’.

Director Theo Rollason’s found-footage documentary ‘Queer Edward II’ paints an intimate, absorbing, surprisingly timely portrait of radical gay film-maker Derek Jarman during a stormy political period.

Little Mario and his grouchy granddad (Toni Servillo) spend a ghostly weekend alone together, one that turns into an existential battle of wills in Mario Martone’s slyly amusing adaptation of Domenico Starnone’s novel ‘Trick’ (‘Scherzetto’).

In anonymous interviews with Secret Service eyewitnesses about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, including the extent and methods of killing that have made civilian casualties astronomical, ‘NAZA’ is an anguishing testament to inhumanity.

A mammoth 4-hour extravaganza of brilliant, cutting-edge cinema that has been in the making for the last 20 years, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s wildly imaginative critique of Soviet society DAU found an appreciative showcase in Venice competition.

Director Alex Gibney’s marathon documentary portrait of controversial billionaire business tycoon Elon Musk is rich in gossipy detail but short on surprises.

Real-life couple Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem play troubled screen spouses in ‘Bunker’, a glossy-looking, socially conscious psychological thriller from ‘The Father’ writer-director Florian Zeller.

Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to storytelling from a child’s POV in the visually dazzling and narratively charming ‘Look Back’, where two talented schoolgirls break into the magical world of manga comics.

Veteran German director Wim Wenders explores the work of prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in his finely crafted 3D documentary ‘From Inside Out’, a beautiful if slightly opaque love letter from one maestro of deluxe minimalism to another,

Nanni Moretti returns to Venice after 37 years to bow ‘It Will Happen Tonight’, an unrepentantly passionate love story starring Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca.

Noted filmmaker Amos Gitai adds another brick to his lifelong critique of Israeli government policies in ‘The Road to Jericho’, whose call for peace between Arabs and Jews has a striking timeliness as the Iran war rages on.

Legendary German director Werner Herzog returns to fictional drama with ‘Bucking Fastard’, an audacious based-on-reality fairy tale starring Rooney and Kate Mara as sisters who share a spookily close bond.

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA hit men sharing a poignant farewell mission in ‘Wild Horse Nine’, the latest knockout black comedy from ‘In Bruges’ and ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ writer-director Martin McDonagh.

Ashgan El-Hamus’s loosely structured first feature ‘Al Baraneya’ uses a mosaic of scenes from rural Egyptian life to champion both a close-knit community and women’s right to choose their own lives.