After Italy’s (almost total) absence from the Berlin and Cannes film festivals, the country’s cinema offer is being well presented with a wide selection of titles at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, on the Lido from 2 – 12 September 2026. Alberto Barbera, artistic director of Biennale Cinema, has talked about how cinema today is increasingly becoming “an extraordinary instrument for understanding reality”, a useful tool to explore and reflect on major contemporary crises. Within this broad and diverse panorama, Nanni Moretti, Edoardo De Angelis, Andrea Pallaoro, Paolo Strippoli and Marco Bechis are the Italian directors in competition.
“All our major contemporary issues are reflected in films and these don’t simply report on situations but translate them into stories and narratives crafted through the most powerful language in existence: cinema. War, climate change, immigration, familial fracture and conflict, adolescent hopes and fears, growing social tension, the legacy of historical events of a past that is never past: I don’t believe there is another artistic and expressive medium capable of simultaneously exerting an aesthetic, cultural, and social function as powerful and compelling as cinema”, notes Barbera.
Absent since 1989, Nanni Moretti is coming – or, rather, finally returning - to the Venice Film Festival with his new film Succederà questa notte (It will happen tonight), based on a novel by Eshkol Nevo and starring Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca: “It is to be hoped that this long-awaited return will somehow help us forget and forgive the mistake made 37 years ago”, notes Barbera.
Edoardo De Angelis also returns in Competition for the second time with Il fuoco che ti porti dentro, based on the successful memoir by Antonio Franchini: “Vanessa Scalera is extraordinary as she impressively embodies the ruthless yet comical portrait of a possessive and hostile mother; a distillation of the Neapolitan essence that her children try to escape by emigrating north”, comments the artistic director.
Andrea Pallaoro is competing with an international film, The Echo Chamber, which draws on Bernardo Bertolucci’s last written work. The film, starring Luca Marinelli, Alicia Vikander, and Susan Sarandon, is based on “a largely autobiographical story, about Bertolucci and his suffering during the last years of his life, but it’s also a film by Pallaoro, who appropriates Bernardo’s screenplay and makes it his own with his own style, his own storytelling, and with the help of three great actors”, explains Barbera.
Paolo Strippoli’s third film, L’estranea, brings horror to the competition at Venice Film Festival 83, with a greater ambition and maturity than his previous works, notes Barbera, and an exceptional cast that includes Jasmine Trinca, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Adriano Giannini, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.
Adriano Giannini also stars in the fifth Italian film in competition at Venice Film Festival, Ritorno a Buenos Aires by Marco Bechis. A return in every sense of the word for the director who has special ties to Argentina: Barbera emphasizes: “Almost 40 years have passed since the Argentine dictatorship and 27 years since his first film, Olympic Garage, which told the story of the opponents of the Pinochet regime interned in the infamous detention centre where Bechis himself was held prisoner for months. The director returns to the scene of those bloody events to tell the story of a former internee who, years later, is called to testify at the trial of the soldiers who kidnapped and tortured him during the military dictatorship, the very same regime that organized the 1978 World Cup while gripping the country in illegal repression".
Alongside the Italian films, co-productions also include Kami nour (A Bit of Light) by Ali Asgari, also in competition at Venice Film Festival 83. The story of an Iranian doctor who, after being arrested and seeing his practice closed, loses faith in the future and decides to take his own life. But one last day spent with his family begins to change his mind.
The opening film of the Orizzonti section at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, La ragazza con la Leica by Alina Marazzi, is an Italian, Swiss, German and French co-production, loosely based on the novel by Helena Janeczek, winner of the Strega Prize. At the centre of the choral story is a group of young left-wing Jews who leave Berlin in the 1930s to escape Nazism and go to Paris. Photographer Gerda Taro spends a last day with Robert Capa, one of her great loves, and the friends with whom she fled Nazi Germany before returning to the Spanish front with her Leica during the final days of the civil war.
Orizzonti welcomes another female director with actress Anna Foglietta’s directorial debut, Una storia, starring Alba Rohrwacher and Guido Caprino, about the “marital turmoil of a wife who discovers the emptiness of her existence after her daughter leaves home and family to go to university”.
Another a feature-length film debut is I figli della scimmia by documentary maker Tommaso Landucci, which stars Riccardo Scamarcio as the father of a disabled boy. Barbera notes that the actor embodies “the nuances and struggle of supporting the weight of a disabled child with great subtlety, while the director finds the right tone to tell a personal and family drama without overindulging in pathos”.
Edoardo Gabbriellini has succeeded in adapting Nicola Lagioia’s famous novel about the murder of young Luca Varani for the big screen. With a screenplay by Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo, the director brings La città dei vivi to the Orizzonti section. “Many have tried in recent years since the novel came out - explains Barbera - but Gabbriellini succeeds by taking some small liberties from the book and relying on a cast with standout performances from Valerio Mastandrea and Emanuele Maria di Stefano”.
The feature-length films presented in Orizzonti include The Color of the Sun which benefitted from the support of Italy in co-production with Canada and Japan. It is the second work from French Canadian director Xavier Tera whose story is set in Okinawa, where the presence of one of the largest American bases in the Eastern Pacific causes more than a few conflicts with the local communities. “The film tells the story of the friendship between two teenagers, a Japanese local and the young son of an American officer, put to the test by yet another accident that occurs in the city”, explains Barbera.
Another co-production (Austria – Italy) present at Orizzonti is Eklipse, the first work by Manuel Wetscher “a very talented director whose next exploits I am looking forward”, confesses Barbera. Set in 1999, Eklipse is the story of the friendship between two teenagers who spend a summer working on an Alpine dairy farm and “a first work of great psychological intensity, a coming-of-age story set within a sense of marginalization, mistrust and prejudice due to the spread of AIDS”.
The Venice Open – Out of Competition section, also full of Italian titles, presents the only TV series scheduled at the Biennale Cinema 2026, Peccato directed by Valerio Vestoso and written by him with Emanuela Fanelli, by now a regular at the Venice Film Festival, who also stars. Six 50’ episodes involve an incredible number of actors, “mostly big names from Italian cinema who agreed to make a cameo in this mockumentary comedy, as the author defined it, which retraces the tragicomic career of Fanelli herself from an imaginary future”.
Alongside the previously announced closing film, Dio ride by Giovanni Veronesi with Pierfrancesco Favino as a 17th century friar, another eagerly awaited title has been added to the Venice Open – Out of Competition section of the Festival, Nessun Dolore by Gianni Amelio starring Alessandro Borghi, Valeria Golino and Valerio Mastandrea. “It’s the story of a man who takes upon himself all the pain in the world after the death of a child, a very young illegal immigrant in Rome, for whom he feels somehow responsible”, says Barbera.
Another well-known name at the Venice Film Festival, Mario Martone, will also be presenting his new film, Scherzetto, in the Venice Open – Out of Competition section, a return to the big screen with his long-time theatre partner and friend Toni Servillo in a story taken from the novel by Domenico Starnone. “The film is largely shot inside an apartment, where Toni Servillo is required to come to the city he left, Naples, to spend time with his somewhat uncontrollable five-year-old grandson, something that forces him to come to terms with himself, the ghosts of the past, and his present-day life as a successful illustrator in Milan”, explains Barbera.
Also in the Venice Spotlight section is a new film from Gábor Reisz, winner of Orizzonti in 2023: Földszint (Ground Floor) is a co-production between Italy and Hungary, “a grotesque comedy in which the vicissitudes of a mould-ridden apartment building can be read as a metaphor for Hungary during the darkness of Orban’s dictatorship”, explains Barbera.
The Biennale College section, dedicated to films directly funded by the Biennale, features Demetra in esilio by Maria Giovanna Cicciari, a story set in Milan about Daria and Lia, a mother and daughter. Daria does not leave the house and has created a small ecosystem of plants inside the apartment. Lia only goes out to do the shopping and to work on her art project inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The images she films outside her home gradually lead her to recognize her own destiny.
In the Venice Spotlight section is Serpenti, directed by Roberto De Paolis Maino, starring Leonardo Lidi, Alessandro Borghi, Pietro Castellitto, and Valeria Golino. As with La Città dei vivi, the story is by the D’Innocenzo Brothers, who co-wrote this screenplay with Roberto De Paolis Maino. Barbera notes that “De Paolis makes a significant departure from the Italian crime genre we’re used to, choosing a surreal and grotesque tone that’s not exactly common in our country, making this a project that’s both provocative and exciting”.