Venice Days sets Lili Horvát’s Mars mystery as female-led opener

Lili Horvát’s first English-language feature will launch Venice Days this year, with Mackenzie Davis and Rupert Friend fronting the Hungarian director’s science-tinged drama My Notes on Mars, organizers announced.

The film opens Giornate degli Autori, the independently run Venice Film Festival section also known as Venice Days. Its 2026 program puts women at the center, through both female directors and films focused on women’s lives, according to the section.

Venice Days said the lineup includes 25 world premieres across its sections, with 14 of those films directed by women. The 23rd edition runs Sept. 2-12 alongside the main Venice Film Festival.

A missing wife, a memorial and Mars

My Notes on Mars follows Margot, an astrophysicist whose marriage to Sam is under strain. According to the synopsis released by the section, Margot disappears during a hike with her husband, then returns weeks later on the day of her own memorial service.

When she comes back, Margot has no memory of her life, except for her work on Mars. The film follows Horvát’s Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, which screened at Venice and Toronto in 2020.

The opener is one of 10 competition titles. Venice Days said they will be assessed by an all-female jury led by Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón, whose films include Alcarràs and Romeria. The other jurors are Hania Mroue, founder and director of Beirut’s Metropolis Cinema, and Italian director-producer Sara Fgaier.

Competition slate leans global

Among the competition films is Kuba Dorabialski’s Agata the Writer, starring Mia Wasikowska as a Polish-Australian satirical novelist who leaves Sydney for Sarajevo to write about the Bosnian war and faces pushback from locals.

Other titles include Nicola Sorcinelli’s Balcanica, about Afghan musicians traveling the Balkan route after music is banned in their country. Matilda De Angelis, known for Citadel: Diana, stars and is also a co-producer.

Damilola Orimogunje’s Dear Ajayi centers on two estranged Nigerian sisters brought back together at the wake of a tragedy. Robert Guédiguian’s A Woman Today follows Juliette, a young finance executive whose life falls apart after she is assaulted by a colleague at a company event, according to Venice Days.

The competition lineup also includes Maria Aparicio’s Sadness Sometimes, Other Times Revolt, Mykyta Gibalenko’s Camouflage, Boris Hadžija and Hoda Taheri’s I Plant My Hand in the Garden, Pauline Julier and Nicolas Chapoulier’s Les Indes, and Nathalia Acevedo’s Salón De Bellezza.

Special events and shorts

Outside competition, Léa Domenach’s A Man’s Skin will close the section. Venice Days describes it as a queer, feminist musical comedy set during the Italian Renaissance, reuniting Domenach with Catherine Deneuve after The President’s Wife.

Special events include Francesca Archibugi’s documentary Carla Lonzi, A Feminist Story, about radical feminist activist and art critic Carla Lonzi, and Ashgan El-Hamus’ debut Al Baraneya, about a pregnant young woman in an Egyptian village weighing a possible city future if her family’s land is sold.

Short films by Mona Fastvold and Claire Denis will screen through Miu Miu Women’s Tales, the Prada-backed series of shorts directed by women.

Artistic director Gaia Furrer said in a statement that the selection ranges across sentimental science fiction, experimental documentaries, historical films, family melodramas, anti-hero westerns and musical comedies, with works blurring documentary, fiction, autobiography and invention.

This edition is dedicated to Giorgio Gosetti, the Italian film critic who founded Venice Days in 2004. The section said Gosetti, who died in Rome in March at 70, guided the organization for 23 years.

This story draws on original reporting from Variety.