Venice Giornate slate puts women directors and Giorgio Gosetti in focus

Mackenzie Davis will help launch this year’s Giornate degli Autori in Venice, with Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát’s sci-fi romance My Notes on Mars set as the opening film for the parallel section’s 2026 edition.

Organizers said the program was selected from 1,036 submissions spanning 114 countries. The slate includes 25 world premieres, 13 Italian works and 14 films directed by women, with 10 titles in competition, one out-of-competition closing film, five special events and nine films in the Venetian Nights showcase.

The 23rd edition, which runs alongside the Venice Film Festival in September, is dedicated to Giorgio Gosetti, the film critic and festival executive who founded the sidebar and died suddenly in March.

Giornate artistic director Gaia Furrer said the edition carries “a deep void and a deep gratitude,” adding that Gosetti gave the section its founding idea and its belief in new directions in cinema.

Horvát’s My Notes on Mars, her first English-language feature, stars Davis as a scientist who disappears while hiking, then turns up on the day of her own memorial service with no memory of the life she has lived in the meantime. Rupert Friend also appears in the film.

Horvát has prior history with the sidebar. Her Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time premiered at Giornate in 2020 and later won awards including the Golden Hugo in Chicago’s New Directors Competition.

The section will close out of competition with Léa Domenach’s A Man’s Skin, described by organizers as a queer feminist musical comedy set during the Italian Renaissance. The cast includes Pomme, Karin Viard and Catherine Deneuve.

Among the competition titles, Polish-born, Australia-based filmmaker Kuba Dorabialski brings Agata the Writer, starring Mia Wasikowska as an Australian author who travels to Sarajevo to write about the Bosnian war and confronts the limits of her artistic perspective.

Actor Nathalia Acevedo, known for Post Tenebras Lux, makes her directing debut with Salón de Belleza. Adapted from Mario Bellatin’s novel, the film is set in a beauty salon in a disease-stricken city that becomes a shelter for people living between life and death. Sam Louwyck and Erwan Kepoa Falé co-star.

Robert Guédiguian is also in the race with A Woman Today. Marilou Aussilloux stars as a young woman weighing her own idea of freedom against a present still marked by violence and inequality, alongside Guédiguian regulars Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Gérard Meylan.

Competition lineup

• Sadness Sometimes, Other Times Revolt, María Aparicio, Argentina and Spain
• Agata the Writer, Kuba Dorabialski, Australia
• Balcanica, Nicola Sorcinelli, Italy, Serbia and Croatia
• Camouflage, Mykyta Gibalenko, Germany
• Dear Ajayi, Damilola Orimogunje, Nigeria and Germany
• I Plant My Hand in the Garden, Boris Hadžija and Hoda Taheri, Germany, Serbia and the U.S.
• The Indies, Pauline Julier and Nicolas Chapoulier, Switzerland and Spain
• My Notes on Mars, Lili Horvát, Hungary and Austria
• Salón de Belleza, Nathalia Acevedo, Mexico and France
• A Woman Today, Robert Guédiguian, France and Italy

Special events

• Al Baraneya, Ashgan El-Hamus
• Carla Lonzi, a Feminist Story, Francesca Archibugi
• The Phantom, Ignacio Masllorens and David Lamelas
• The Massacre, Cosimo Messeri
• Even If Hell Came, Samuele Rossi

This story draws on original reporting from Deadline.