Venice 2026: The Films Most Likely to Make the Cut ...Middle East

After the studios snubbed Cannes — for the first time in decades not a single studio-backed movie premiered on the Croisette this year — the focus has shifted to Venice and the question of whether the majors will return to the Lido in force.

A big studio show this year would strengthen director Alberto Barbera’s position as the award season whisperer. Venice 2025 saw the launch of eventual Oscar-winner Frankenstein and multi-nominee Bugonia but also the quick-fire fizzles A House of Dynamite and Jay Kelly. (Not to mention After the Hunt and The Smashing Machine, which were dead on arrival).

A few big names have ruled themselves out — Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars will drop ahead of the festival — but the studio contenders still looks impressive. Netflix is certain to be out in force — David Fincher’s Brad Pitt-starrer The Adventures of Cliff Booth is their biggest fall title that could be Lido-bound — and tentpoles including Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger (Warner Bros.) and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning (Sony) can’t be ruled out.

Beyond the majors, Venice should have its pick of arthouse faves. Here is our long list of the projects most likely to make the cut for the 83rd Biennale — from Lido regulars and up-and-comers, studio stalwarts and indie darlings.

‘A Good Little Soldier,’ Director Stéphane Brizé

French director Stéphane Brizé has screened his last three features — A Woman’s Life (2016), Another World (2021) and Out of Season (2023) — in competition at Venice, and it would be a shock if his latest doesn’t make the Lido cut. Gaumont has set a Nov. 25 release in France, so a Fall festival bow looks certain.

Venice faves Alba Rohrwacher (2014 Best Actress winner for Hungry Hearts) and Vincent Lindon (Best Actor winner for 2024’s The Quiet Son) star in this corporate drama, with Rohwacher playing a devoted HR executive caught between caring for her colleagues’ well-being and the performance goals of her demanding boss (Lindon).

‘A Long Winter,’ Director Andrew Haigh

Andrew Haigh may be looking to return to Venice, where his 2017 feature Lean on Pete premiered, for his latest. The festival has been courting him, enticing the British director to serve on the 2024 Venice Jury. But Haigh picked Telluride for the premiere of his breakout feature, All of Us Strangers, and the fest could have the edge over Venice for his follow-up. Even the mountain setting of the new drama, adapted from a Colm Tóibín short story and starring Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Caitríona Balfe and Fred Hechinger, would seem to favor Colorado over the Lido. Expect producer/distributor Mubi to have the final say.

‘Alpha Gang,’ Director David and Nathan Zellner

After two decades of kicking out cultish projects at Sundance (Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, Sasquatch Sunset), the Zellner brothers could be poised for a splashy launch on the Lido. Alpha Gang, described as an eccentric alien invasion comedy, wrapped in Hungary last July. Cate Blanchett stars as Alpha One, leader of an extraterrestrial strike force disguised in human form as a 1950s leather-clad biker gang, whose ruthless conquest of Earth unravels when the crew catches, per the film’s official description, “the most toxic, contagious human disease of all: emotion.”

Chris Pine, Dave Bautista, Léa Seydoux, Lily-Rose Depp, Adria Arjona and Doona Bae fill out the gang with memorable faces, with It Follows DP Mike Gioulakis shooting. Mk2 Films is selling internationally, with CAA Media Finance handling North American rights.

‘Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo,’ Director Takashi Miike

First Abel Ferrara, then Werner Herzog — next comes a Bad Lieutenant care of Japan’s most prolific provocateur. Shun Oguri plays the titular degenerate cop, a corrupt gambler in Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Force, pulled into a tangled case when an enigmatic FBI agent (Lily James) arrives to investigate the disappearance of a politician’s daughter (WWE star Liv Morgan), with a deviant killer of the yakuza underworld shadowing their moves. Audition scribe Daisuke Tengan wrote the script, and Jeremy Thomas produced. The film wrapped last year, and Neon reportedly has it set for a September release stateside. Announcing the project, Miike promised, “a fastball straight down the middle of the strike zone.” He previously competed in Venice with the Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) and samurai remake 13 Assassins (2010).

‘Behemoth!,’ Director Tony Gilroy

Fourteen years after his last feature — and fresh off the universally acclaimed Star Wars series Andor — Tony Gilroy returns to the big screen with what he’s called the most personal project of his career. Drawing on his own youth as a musician, the director of Michael Clayton describes Behemoth! as a movie that “surfs on music.”

Pedro Pascal plays a cellist from a family of musicians who returns to Los Angeles for session work, with the film’s score reportedly triggering flashbacks across two decades to reveal why he left and why he’s come back. Will Arnett — stepping in for Stranger Things‘ David Harbour, who exited after the shoot began — co-stars alongside Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor and Matthew Lillard. Gilroy reunites with his acclaimed Andor cinematographer Damián García. Searchlight hasn’t dated the film yet, but it’s expected to launch during the fall awards corridor, which could set the stage for Gilroy’s European festival debut. 

‘Being Heumann,’ Director Sian Heder

Sian Heder’s follow-up to her Oscar-winner CODA is an adaptation of the memoir of disability rights activist Judy Heumann, following her 28-day occupation of the San Francisco Federal Building in 1977, a landmark protest for disability rights and accessibility legislation. Ruth Madeley stars as Heumann, Mark Ruffalo plays her advisary, U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr..

An obvious awards play, Being Heumann will land at one of the big fall festivals. If not Venice, than Telluride or TIFF. It may come down to Apple, which is producing and releasing the feature, and who have taken a liking to Venice in recent years, using the Lido to platform their high-end series Disclaimer and the Brad Pitt/George Clooney action comedy Wolfs. Seth Rogen also caught a vaporetto to the festival last year, using Venice as a backdrop for Season 2 of AppleTV’s The Studio.

‘Bucking Fastard,’ Director Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog reportedly turned down an out-of-competition slot in Cannes for his latest feature film, making a Venice premiere all but certain. Siblings Rooney and Kate Mara stars as twins who dig a tunnel through a mountain in search of a mythical land where “true love is possible” in this new piece of existential weirdness from the legendary director of Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man.

‘Bunker,’ Director Florian Zeller

Zeller’s London- and Madrid-shot psychological thriller finished filming early this year and has been in post since spring, which precluded a Cannes entry. The director’s first original screenplay, after adapting two of his own plays for the screen (The Father, The Son), Bunker stars real-life spouses Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz as a couple whose marriage buckles after he, a celebrated architect, accepts a commission to build a bunker for a billionaire.

Zeller has said he wrote the script expressly for the Spanish pair, hoping to draw on the texture of a real long-term cohabitation. Stephen Graham, Paul Dano and Patrick Schwarzenegger co-star. FilmNation is handling sales. None of Bunker‘s principals are Venice newcomers. The Son premiered in competition there in 2022, and both leads have won Volpi Cups — Bardem for Before Night Falls (2000), Cruz for Parallel Mothers (2021).

‘Circles,’ Director Michel Franco

Circles marks a departure, geographic at least, for Michel Franco. Instead of modern-day Mexico, the Hebrew-language film is set in early-1950s, during the formative years of the State of Israel. Co-written with Tom Shoval (Youth), it follows real-life brother and sister Meir and Shoshana Har Zion, whose lives tracked the bloody history of the region. Produced by Alexander Rodnyansky of AR Content, Circles was snatched up for France by Metropolitan, leading some to assume it would premiere in Cannes, but Venice, where Franco won the Silver Lion for New Order back in 2021, now looks the safe bet.

‘Cry to Heaven,’ Director Tom Ford

Tom Ford successfully premiered his first two features in Venice: 2009’s A Single Man won Best Actor for star Colin Firth and Nocturnal Animals took the 2016 Grand Jury Prize. The Italian setting of Cry to Heaven — adapted from the Anne Rice novel, about an 18th century Venetian noble and a maestro castrato from Calabria who team up to make it big in the opera world — and the stacked cast, featuring Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, George MacKay and Adele, make the Lido the most likely launch pad for his new film as well.

‘Digger,’ Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu

If Warner Bros. wills it, Digger will be this year’s event of the Lido. The studio has dated Iñárritu’s first English-language film since The Revenant for U.S. release on Oct. 2, the very same frame Joker claimed in 2019 weeks after winning Venice’s Golden Lion.

Billed as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions,” Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, “the most powerful man in the world,” racing to prove he’s humanity’s savior before a disaster of his own making destroys everything. Although technically a studio comedy, the film is suffused with awards season pedigree. Emmanuel Lubezki shot Digger on 35mm VistaVision, and Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde and Emma D’Arcy fill out the $125 million production. Iñárritu is also a Venice regular — 21 Grams, Birdman (en route to best picture), and Bardo also premiered there. Cruise got his fighter-jet moment in Cannes just a few years ago; perhaps it’s time for an armada of water taxis.

‘Dune: Part Three,’ Director Denis Villeneuve

Warner Bros. has set Villeneuve’s trilogy-closer for release on Dec. 18 — head-to-head with Marvel-Disney’s Avengers: Doomsday, a clash some have already dubbed “Dunesday.” At this point, a December tentpole of Dune‘s scale hardly needs a festival. But Villeneuve and Venice have history: the director premiered Arrival in competition in 2016 and launched Dune: Part One to tremendous fanfare out of competition on the Lido in 2021.

Shot on 65mm film and IMAX formats, largely in Budapest, the Dune Messiah adaptation wrapped in November 2025, plenty of time for the project’s prodigious VFX to be ready by September. Timothée Chalamet’s emperor Paul faces the conspiracies of Frank Herbert’s follow-up novel alongside Zendaya, Florence Pugh, Jason Momoa, Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem, with Robert Pattinson joining the saga, reportedly as shape-shifting villain Scytale. Part Two, released in March 2024, skipped festivals entirely — but Barbera is undoubtedly taking his shot.

‘Harmonia,’ Director Guy Nattiv

Guy Nattiv made Lido history in 2023 when Tatami — the first feature ever co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian, made with Zar Amir Ebrahimi — world-premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti competition. The Israeli director has described his follow-up as his “most personal film” to date. Drawn from his own grandmother’s real-life entanglement with a sinister cult, the 1980s-set thriller stars Carrie Coon as Rita, a mother who abandons her family for an all-female commune run by Lily James’ radiant young guru; Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young play the daughters who stage a rescue mission. The film shot in British Columbia last summer and Bleecker Street, which released Nattiv’s Golda, holds U.S. rights and plans a late 2026 theatrical release.

‘Here Comes the Flood,’ Fernando Meirelles

Netflix paid seven figures for Simon Kinberg’s spec script back in 2020 — Jason Bateman was once attached to direct — and the long-gestating heist thriller, told in nonlinear fashion, has finally come together under City of God director Fernando Meirelles. Denzel Washington, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Robert Pattinson star in the tale of a bank guard, a teller and a master thief locked in a deadly game of cons and double crosses, with Danai Gurira, Sean Harris and Justin Kirk supporting.

The film was shot in New Jersey through late January, with Meirelles reuniting with his City of God DP César Charlone. Netflix hasn’t dated Here Comes the Flood yet, nor revealed whether it will be positioned as a potential awards contender or simply a commercial play with an especially high-end cast.

‘I’ll Forget Your Name,’ Director Yann Gonzalez

Yann Gonzalez has been a Cannes stalwart — his debut short By the Kiss (2006) premiered there, as have both his features, You and the Night (2013), and Knife + Heart (2013) — but his new feature was picked for last year’s Venice Gap-Financing Market, and those projects, once finished, tend to land on the Lido. The film seen Gonzalez re-teaming with Vanessa Paradis and his brother, M83 frontman Anthony Gonzalez, on what is described as a gothic fantasy romance.

Paradis plays a 50-year-old schoolteacher living in a remote mountain village who leads a double life as a one-night-stand seducer of lonely men. But the main attraction for Venice could be her co-star, Filippo Scotti, the young Italian who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award as best emerging actor at the festival in 2021 for Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God.

‘Ink,’ Director Danny Boyle

After his bloody comeback with zombie franchise reboot 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle is shifting gears with this drama, adapted from James Graham’s stage play, about the rise of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Guy Pearce plays Murdoch with Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb, editor of Murdoch-owned British tabloid The Sun. It looks like a strong return to biographical drama for the Steve Jobs director. It’s a toss up which Fall fest will land it. Venice has a good chance but Ink could as easily look to Telluride, where Boyle screened Steve Jobs, or Toronto, where he triumphed with Slumdog Millionaire, as the launch pad for its award run.

‘I Play Rocky,’ Director Peter Farrelly

I Play Rocky has been a hot title since FilmNation began shopping it to international buyers back in Cannes 2024. A Hollywood-behind-Hollywood feature, it follows Sylvester Stallone in his struggles to get his 1976 classic made, while insisting he, an acting no-hoper, will play the lead. Anthony Ippolito, who played a young Al Pacino in Paramount’s “making of The Godfather” series The Offer, is Stallone, with Jay Duplass as Rocky director John G. Avildsen, Stephan James as Carl Weathers, and Matt Dillon as Frank Stallone Sr.

Amazon MGM, who have domestic rights, have dated this for a Nov. 13 limited release, going wide Nov. 20, almost 50 years to the day of the original Rocky premiere (released Nov. 21, 1976). The film history hook, and Balboa’s Italian roots, would make this one a nice fit for Venice, but given Farrelly’s penchant for Toronto — he premiered both Green Book (2018) and The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) at TIFF — the Great North seems the most likely launchpad.

‘It Will Happen Tonight,’ Director Nanni Moretti

This could be the year Barbera claims back one of Italy’s most established festival favorites. Every Moretti feature since Caro diario (1994) has premiered at Cannes, but the Palme d’Or winner’s romantic drama — his second adaptation of an Eshkol Nevo work after Three Floors — shot through last autumn in Spain, Rome and Turin, was conspicuously absent from the Croisette in May. A Venice bow would be his first since Palombella rossa in 1989.

Spanish distributor BTeam has dated the Italy-France-Spain co-production for Christmas, solid positioning for a Lido launch. Louis Garrel leads opposite Jasmine Trinca — the female lead of Moretti’s Palme d’Or winner The Son’s Room some 25 years ago — with Moretti, who recovered quickly from a 2025 heart attack, taking a small role himself. Interweaving several of Nevo’s stories, the film, the director has said, “manages to describe our feelings today, our fears.”

Jesse Eisenberg Untitled Musical

After the success of A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg is poised to take his most ambitious swing yet: an original musical, for which he wrote the songs himself. Julianne Moore plays a shy woman unexpectedly cast in a community-theater production who goes to extremes as she loses herself in the role, falling under the spell of its strong-willed director, played by Paul Giamatti. Halle Bailey,  Havana Rose Liu and Broadway legend Bernadette Peters co-star, with Emma Stone producing through her Fruit Tree banner and A24 distributing.

The pedigree behind the camera is similarly stacked, with Anora DP Drew Daniels shooting, Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler staging the musical numbers, and A Complete Unknown’s Steven Gizicki supervising the music. Shooting wrapped after an April start in New Jersey. Eisenberg is a Sundance regular — both his prior features bowed in Park City — but a finished fall-ready musical of this scale makes sense for a step up into the European prestige leagues. 

‘Kawalan,’ Director Lav Diaz

Lav Diaz may be an acquired taste, but Venice has embraced the slow cinema style of the Filipino filmmaker and his latest durational opus looks Lido-bound. Set in the Philippines during the pre-World War II Commonwealth period, it follows the old, venerable mayor of the remote town of Kawalan, who, after learning of the impending Japanese invasion, organizes members in his community to set up a hidden settlement in the middle of the forest, where they hope to escape the impending atrocities of the war. Even if Kawalan doesn’t make the competition cut, it looks a lock for Venice’s Horizons sidebar.

‘Let Love In,’ Director Felix van Groeningen

Felix van Groeningen’s new feature looks a sure pick for Venice, given the blockbuster success, in Italy, of his last feature, The Eight Mountains, and the red carpet draw of its Italian star Luca Marinelli. Charlotte Vandermeersch, co-director on Eight Mountains, penned the script to Let Love In with Van Groeningen and Anne Paulicevich, and steps in front of the camera to co-star alongside Marinelli as a couple whose relationship is destabilised after a long-buried affair resurfaces.

‘Look Back,’ Director Hirokazu Kore-eda

With its Japan release date set for Sept. 11, smack in the middle of Venice, Look Back could give perennial Japanese festival favorite Hirokazu Kore-eda his second high profile European premiere this year. Completed not long after his speculative soft-sci-fi Sheep in the Box, which competed at Cannes in May, Look Back is the first live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s beloved manga, a coming-of-age story about two girls chasing their dreams of becoming manga artists.

Produced by start-up label K2 Pictures, Look Back was shot in Japan’s northern Nikaho City with Natsuki Deguchi starring as the cocky Fujino and Aju Makita as her reclusive classmate Kyomoto. As usual, Kore-eda wrote, directed and edited the feature. GKIDS has already snapped up U.S., U.K. and Irish rights, while Goodfellas is selling it elsewhere outside Asia. Kore-eda’s Lido history runs deep — his debut Maborosi bowed there in 1995.

‘Mimesis’ Director Kaouther Ben Hania

Kaouther Ben Hania looks set to return to Venice a year after her docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab rocked the Lido, winning the Grand Jury Prize on the way to an Oscar nomination. This feature, described as an epic love story set in Tunsia in the 1940s and 1990s, was ready to shoot in 2024, before Hind Rajab, but Ben Hania put the project on hold to focus on the more politically urgent story of the Palestinian girl killed, along with her family, by Israeli forces in Gaza.

‘Musk,’ Director Alex Gibney

Alex Gibney delivered a finished cut of his hotly-anticipated documentary on Elon Musk early last year only to return to the editing suite to reshape the film, expanding its scope to include Musk’s involvement in U.S. politics and his DOGE escapades. Recent Musk-y headlines, including the hype around the IPO of Space X, and his new status as the world’s first trillionaire, could mean further delays, so a Venice premiere is far from certain.

‘No Pain,’ Director Gianni Amelio

As a Venice veteran, and Golden Lion winner (for The Way We Laughed in 1998), Amelio should be guaranteed a competition slot for his lastest. The drama, featuring Italian stars Valeria Golino and Alessandro Borghi, is set in a town struck down by a strange phenomenon which puts the entire population to sleep. The main question is whether the film, which just finished principle photography in April, will be ready for the Lido.

‘Possible Love,’ Director Lee Chang-dong

Eight years after Burning, the elder statesman of Korean arthouse cinema returns. Backed by Netflix and already buzzed-about as one of the streamer’s leading international awards contenders of the year, Lee’s latest searing melodrama is said to follow two married couples leading completely opposite lives whose worlds collide, sending fractures through their daily existence.

Korean screen royalty Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu play Mi-ok and Ho-seok, opposite Zo In-sung and Parasite‘s Cho Yeo-jeong, with Lee co-writing alongside Oh Jung-mi. The casting is a homecoming in itself — Jeon won Cannes’ best actress prize for Lee’s landmark Secret Sunshine, Sul anchored his classics Peppermint Candy and Oasis, and this marks the pair’s fourth screen partnership. Lee is usually a Cannes stalwart, but Netflix is all but certain to bring him back to the Lido for the first time since he received the Silver Lion for best direction in 2002 for Oasis.

‘Primetime,’ Director Lance Oppenheim

Documentarian Lance Oppenheim — whose unnerving studies of eccentric American subcultures span Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld and HBO’s Ren Faire — makes his narrative feature debut with an A24 film starring Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the NBC newsman whose televised predator stings became a mid-2000s ratings phenomenon. Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers, in her feature debut, co-star, and Pattinson produces through his Icki Eneo Arlo banner alongside Square Peg’s Lars Knudsen and Ari Aster. Shot in New Orleans in early 2025, the film dropped a queasy first teaser in late May, and A24 is reportedly targeting a fall release.

‘Saturn Return,’ Director Greg Kwedar

In astrology, a Saturn return is the planet’s roughly 29-year homecoming to its natal position — the cosmic deadline for growing up. Greg Kwedar’s follow-up to Train Dreams is a Chicago-set romance spanning the decade between aspirational college love and the complicated realities of adulthood, told across two timelines as former best friends Eve, Anders and Nathan reunite as virtual strangers at a funeral, the film tracing “what was lost in between and what can still be found.”

Charles Melton, Rachel Brosnahan and Will Poulter lead, with David Morse, Kim Dickens and Jean Yoon in supporting parts. Gaelyn Golde wrote the script — revised by Kwedar and his Train Dreams partner Clint Bentley — and Plan B produces for Netflix. Plan B’s awards pedigree and Melton’s rising star power make Venice a natural launch pad, with Toronto a potential fallback.

‘Sweetsick,’ Director Alice Birch

Lady Macbeth screenwriter Birch will make her directorial debut with this drama, starring and produced by Cate Blanchett, who plays a woman with a strange gift of being able to see what others most intimately need. Blanchett’s involvement makes the film a good fit for Venice — she was Venice Jury President in 2020, won Best Actress on the Lido for Tár in 2022 and was part of the ensemble cast of last year’s Golden Lion winner Father Mother Sister Brother — but studio backer Searchlight might prefer to premiere the film in Toronto.

‘Tender Loving Care,’ Director Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh, winner of the Golden Lion for Vera Drake in 2004, is looking to return to Venice with his latest, arriving just two years after TIFF contender Hard Truths. As ever with Leigh, plot details of the feature, starring Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson, Kate O’Flynn, and Alice Bailey Johnson remain closely guarded. But the rapid turnaround between projects suggests a renewed creative momentum for the veteran British director, who, at 83, shows no signs of slowing down.

‘The Adventures of Cliff Booth,’ Director David Fincher

Seldom do you get to see such distinctive auteurs enter each other’s worlds. Quentin Tarantino created the characters and wrote the script, but, reluctant to make it his tenth and final film, handed the reins to David Fincher — who reunites with Brad Pitt for the first time since The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, their fourth collaboration after Seven and Fight Club. Pitt reprises his Oscar-winning Once Upon a Time in Hollywood role, the story leaping forward in time to a “very different Hollywood” of 1977, where the former stuntman now works as a studio fixer.

Elizabeth Debicki, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Timothy Olyphant, Carla Gugino, Scott Caan and Peter Weller fill out the ensemble, with Fincher’s regulars Erik Messerschmidt shooting and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scoring the $200 million Netflix production. Just two years ago, Fincher and Netflix premiered The Killer in competition on the Lido, but that film launched on streaming on Nov. 10. Netflix has set an exclusive IMAX run for The Adventures of Cliff Booth on Nov. 25 ahead of its Dec. 23 streaming release — a long stretch, but here’s hoping Barbera pulls off a coup. 

‘The Basics of Philosophy,’ Director Paul Schrader

“Venice is the Lion of my heart,” Paul Schrader declared in 2022, while accepting the festival’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. The Lido has become the go-to launchpad for the Taxi Driver scribe’s late-career output, having premiered First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021) before hosting Master Gardener (2022) out of competition.

Schrader’s latest extends his long-running man-in-a-room lineage: Jack Huston embodies the latest diary-keeping, damaged protagonist, following Ethan Hawke, Oscar Isaac and Joel Edgerton, playing a repressed philosophy professor grappling with buried guilt over a past decision when the victim suddenly reenters his life. Sofia Boutella, Bill Pullman, Dana Delany and Daniel Zovatto co-star, with Good Time DP Sean Price Williams shooting his first Schrader picture and Card Counter producers Braxton Pope and David Wulf back on board. The film wrapped a brisk six-week shoot across Kansas City, New Haven and Los Angeles last July. After his detour to Cannes for 2024’s Oh, Canada, a Lido homecoming for Schrader feels highly likely.

‘The Echo Chamber,’ Director Andrea Pallaoro

The Echo Chamber has a powerful Italian pedigree behind it. The film is built on the final screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci, who died in 2018. The maestro behind The Conformist and The Last Emperor co-wrote the script with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, and it has been entrusted to a fitting custodian: all three of Trento-born Pallaoro’s features have premiered at Venice — Medeas (2013), then Hannah (2017), which won Charlotte Rampling the Volpi Cup, and Monica (2022).

Alicia Vikander and Luca Marinelli star in The Echo Chamber as Anne and Leo, lovers trapped in a bond they can neither escape nor relinquish, with Susan Sarandon as Ava, a voice echoing across time and memory. Paolo Sorrentino’s home shingle Indigo Film produces with Rai Cinema; Paradise City is selling worldwide with UTA co-repping North America. Now in post — and unveiled via first-look images during the Cannes market — the project should be ready in time for September.

‘The Social Reckoning,’ Director Aaron Sorkin

Sixteen years after The Social Network opened the New York Film Festival, Aaron Sorkin returns to the subject of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — this time directing his own script. Billed as a companion piece rather than a sequel, the drama recounts how Facebook engineer-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) enlisted Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) to expose the platform’s most guarded secrets — the reporting published in 2021 as “The Facebook Files” — while Jeremy Strong assumes the Zuckerberg mantle from Jesse Eisenberg.

Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen and Betty Gilpin co-star. In something of a continuity flourish, David Fincher’s Social Network DP Jeff Cronenweth returns behind the camera, but Alexandre Desplat wrote this one’s score rather than Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Columbia has dated the film for Oct. 9. Venice would likely welcome the world premiere, though Telluride and a return to NYFF loom as rivals.

‘The Statement,’ Director Tom McCarthy

A Florida beachside resort, 1980: twenty scientists, activists and policymakers gather for a weekend conference on a curious new issue — CO2 emissions — with one congressional mandate, to “write a statement about what to do.” Tom McCarthy’s darkly comic origin story of the climate debate, adapted from Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth with Jacques Audiard’s regular writers Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, assembles an embarrassment of character-actor riches: Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Tatiana Maslany, Amy Ryan, Evan Peters and Jason Clarke.

McCarthy’s Spotlight world-premiered on the Lido in 2015 on the way to winning the best picture Oscar, and this is his first feature since Stillwater bowed at Cannes five years ago. Sony Pictures Classics would likely prefer to repeat Spotlight‘s playbook, but cameras only rolled in St. Petersburg, Florida this spring, which could make a fall festival bow a stretch. The film hasn’t yet been dated.

‘The Uprising,’ Director Paul Greengrass

Paul Greengrass doesn’t have much history with Venice — his only Lido debut was Netflix real-life drama 22 July back in 2018 — but his latest effort could make the 2026 cut. Andrew Garfield headlines as a farmer who becomes a leader of the English Peasants’ Revolt, the 1381 uprising against King Richard II. The star-studded cast — Thomasin McKenzie, Katherine Waterston, Jamie Bell, Tom Hollander, and Jonny Lee Miller — might tip the balance for Venice, though a Toronto or Telluride bow are just as likely.

‘The Wolf Will Tear Your Immaculate Hands,’ Director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén

Nathalie Álvarez Mesén made her feature debut in Cannes with 2021 Directors’ Fortnight stand outClara Sola, but the Swedish-Costa Rican director is no Venice newbie. Entre Tú y Milagros, which she co wrote with director Mariana Saffon, won the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film on the Lido in 2020. Her sophomore feature, and English-language debut, is a gothic horror co-written with Icelandic author Sjón (Lamb, The Northman). Set in the 1860s Pacific Northwest, it stars Darla Contois (Little Bird) as a Native American governess hired to teach the daughters of a British widower (played by Alexander Skarsgård). Production on the film wrapped in December so a Venice (or Toronto) bow looks likely.

‘Trick,’ Director Mario Martone

Announcing the Naples shoot of Trick earlier this year, Martone offered an appealingly off-hand, entirely Italian logline: “Naples, a house, a grandfather, a four-year-old grandson. Enough of a synopsis?” Adapted with Ippolita di Majo from Domenico Starnone’s novel — translated into English by Jhumpa Lahiri — the chamber piece unfolds almost entirely within an apartment and its balcony over a few days, staging an unexpected duel between Toni Servillo’s Daniele Mallarico, a celebrated illustrator long accustomed to solitude, and his grandson, played by Lorenzo Perrotta, with Serena Rossi and Leonardo Lidi as the boy’s parents.

It’s the seventh Martone-Servillo collaboration, and Martone won Venice’s Grand Jury Prize with his 1992 debut Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician, while Servillo arrives as the reigning Volpi Cup winner for last year’s La grazia. The film wrapped production in the spring, which makes the timeline tight — but after Martone’s recent detours to Cannes for Nostalgia and Fuori, the home turf of the Lido beckons.

‘Wild Horse Nine,’ Director Martin McDonagh

Probably the most bankable Venice contender on this list. McDonagh’s last two features — Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin — both world-premiered in Venice’s competition, both won the festival’s screenplay prize, and together they collected 16 Oscar nominations. Can you imagine a cast with more salty personality? McDonagh’s new one sends CIA agents Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) from Santiago to Easter Island shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup, dispatched by their bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi). Tom Waits and Parker Posey co-star. Among the island’s iconic statues, dark pasts, present conspiracies and Chris’s bond with two rebellious students conspire to send the trip sideways. Produced by Blueprint and Film4, the film has been set for a Nov. 6 release by Searchlight — with a trailer already out since March.

‘Woman, Unknown,’ Director May el-Toukhy

Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy broke out at Sundance in 2019 with Queen of Hearts, winner of the World Cinema dramatic audience award, and her long-awaited third feature looks built for a European festival launchpad. Set in post-World War II Denmark, the drama follows Marie (Mathilde Arcel), a young housekeeper poised to marry the wealthy widower she serves, while guarding a shameful secret: a wartime relationship with a German soldier that resurfaces during the three days surrounding her engagement dinner. Carsten Bjørnlund co-stars in the Nordisk Film production, co-written with longtime collaborator Maren Louise Kähne, shot in Riga, Gothenburg and Copenhagen, and with a late-2026 release planned. An Orizzonti berth beckons, but a big step up into Venice’s main competition is also conceivable.

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