Venice 83 opens with «Ink» by Danny Boyle, five Italian films in competition

The 83rd International Venice Film Festival takes place at the Lido from September 2 to 12, 2026, under the direction of Alberto Barbera. The competition includes twenty films, five of which are Italian: a quarter of the main selection.

The Italian titles in competition are «Ritorno a Buenos Aires» by Marco Bechis, «Il fuoco che ti porti dentro» by Edoardo De Angelis, «The Echo Chamber» by Andrea Pallaoro, «L’estranea» by Paolo Strippoli and «Succederà questa notte» by Nanni Moretti. The latter is the most striking element in the composition of the selection: Moretti returns to competition in Venice forty-five years after the Special Jury Prize he won with «Sogni d’oro».

The opening is entrusted to a film in competition and in world premiere: «Ink» by Danny Boyle, with Guy Pearce, Jack O’Connell and Claire Foy, dedicated to Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the newspaper The Sun. It is a choice that loads the opening night with weight that is not only cinematic: the film recounts the change of ownership from which one of the most influential publishing enterprises in the Anglo-Saxon world was born, and it does so by opening a festival that owes much of its international resonance to that same publishing world.

The closing, out of competition, goes to «Dio ride» by Giovanni Veronesi, screened in the Sala Grande on September 12 after the awards ceremony: the by now familiar formula of a film seen once the verdicts are already known, without competing.

The competition jury is presided over by Maggie Gyllenhaal. The Golden Lions for lifetime achievement will be awarded to George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn — an actor and producer at the center of the contemporary industry and a performer whose career spans some of the founding seasons of modern American cinema.

Out of competition, the selection contains at least three projects worth following for different reasons. The first is «Joie de vivre», a seven-hour documentary by Luca Guadagnino on Bernardo Bertolucci: a length that places the film in the territory of works intended for a specialized audience, and that poses a practical scheduling problem for the Mostra as well as a critical one. The second is «The Basics of Philosophy» by Paul Schrader. The third is the portrait Wim Wenders dedicates to architect Peter Zumthor, the second chapter in a line of work that brings a fiction director into architectural documentary.

On the numbers front, the Italian presence in competition — five titles out of twenty — is the figure from which every discussion of the selection will start. It should be read bearing in mind that the Mostra is the national festival of the host country and that this proportion, in itself, says nothing about the quality of the chosen films: that will be told by the screenings and the verdict of the jury presided over by Gyllenhaal.

The calendar sets three key dates for those following the event: September 2 with the world premiere of Boyle’s film, September 12 with the awards ceremony, and the evening of September 12 itself with the closing screening of Veronesi’s film. Between these two extremes lie the twenty official competition screenings and the parallel sections.

The reconstruction rests on three sources: official press releases from the Biennale di Venezia, the press conference presenting the Mostra and the official selection announced on July 23.