Robert Pattinson as a predator-catcher, Werner Herzog digging tunnels and the return of Lee Chang-dong; the world’s oldest film festival has done it again.

Come September, the water taxis fill up, and the world’s oldest film festival takes over the Lido. The 83rd Venice Film Festival is back, running from today (2nd September) until 12th September, with Maggie Gyllenhaal, fresh from her second stint behind the camera with The Bride!, presiding over the jury, while George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn will collect Golden Lions for lifetime achievement. The real draw, though, is behind the camera. Danny Boyle, of 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire acclaim, has opening night, and Martin McDonagh, the writer-director behind In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, returns for the first time since the latter premiered here in 2022.

No franchise fare is in the line-up, no sequels or capes, and a clear absence of Hollywood glitz and glamour. But that is the essence of the festival. Since its inception in 1932, Venice has been steadfast in remaining a playground for directors and their forward-thinking cinema. And this year, these industry-leading filmmakers seem fixated on the past, with nearly every selection reaching back decades, from post-war Denmark to 1970s newsrooms, to work out how we ended up here.

Keep scrolling for the seven films we cannot wait for…

Ink, dir. Danny Boyle

Danny Boyle, the Mancunian director behind Trainspotting (1996) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), opens the festival with an adaptation of James Graham’s hit 2017 stage play about how Rupert Murdoch bought a failing tabloid in 1969 and used it to build one of the most controversial and powerful media empires in history. Guy Pearce plays Murdoch, while Jack O’Connell plays Larry Lamb, the editor he hired to take The Sun downmarket and turn it into Britain’s best-selling paper, and Claire Foy plays Jules Davies, an ambitious newsroom editor. Boyle has exquisite form with portraits of empire builders, having put Steve Jobs (2015) on screen a decade ago, and Ink brings him back to his home turf, telling a British story at full tilt in the spirit of his 2012 Olympics Games opening ceremony. He also boasts a Best Director Oscar win for Slumdog, so the pedigree is not in question. Netflix has already bought the US rights ahead of a December cinema release, and expects it to be all over next year’s Oscars.

Primetime, dir. Lance Oppenheim

The buzziest wild card of the festival. Oppenheim, the documentarian behind HBO’s gloriously unhinged Ren Faire (2024), directs his first scripted feature with an A24 production starring Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the To Catch a Predator host who turned hidden-camera stings into a mid-2000s television phenomenon. Back in 2020, his debut documentary, Some Kind of Heaven, a portrait of Florida retirees chasing paradise, premiered at Sundance and immediately presented him as a filmmaker drawn to the quirks of American life. Primetime itself is set in 2006, tracing how the Dateline NBC franchise made Hansen a household name while dragging journalism and true crime into one queasy spectacle, with Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo and, intriguingly, Phoebe Bridgers making her acting debut. Pattinson also produces alongside Ari Aster, so expect something paranoid and slightly feverish. Between this and his recent run of swing-for-the-fences choices, from The Drama to The Odyssey, Pattinson remains the most compelling screen presence of his generation. A24 releases it in cinemas at the end of September, but Venice sees it first.

Wild Horse Nine, dir. Martin McDonagh

McDonagh’s first film since the nine-time Oscar-nominated The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) swaps rural Ireland for Easter Island, Chile’s remote volcanic territory, where a group of CIA men are holidaying in the months before the 1973 coup, blissfully removed from the catastrophe brewing on the mainland. The cast is interestingly absurd: John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey. Venice has been good to McDonagh before, handing Banshees prizes for screenplay and acting on its way to its heavy Academy Award pull, and Wild Horse Nine, a black comedy about American spooks with time on their hands, feels uncomfortably well timed. Before Banshees came In Bruges (2008) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), so expect foul-mouthed tragicomedy of the highest order.

Bucking Fastard, dir. Werner Herzog

German filmmaker Herzog’s first narrative feature in seven years has possibly the strangest premise of the whole festival. Kate and Rooney Mara, real sisters acting together for the first time, play Jean and Joan Holbrooke, siblings so inseparable they speak in unison, love the same man and begin digging a tunnel through a mountain in search of an imaginary land where true love is possible. Loosely inspired by Freda and Greta Chaplin, real-life twins who lived on the fringes of society and became objects of tabloid fascination in 1980s Britain, the film also stars Domhnall Gleeson as the social worker tasked with helping them adapt to modern life. This is the director who once hauled a real steamship over a mountain to make Fitzcarraldo (1982), so two sisters digging a tunnel counts as minimalism. Herzog turned down an invitation from Cannes so the film could debut in Venice instead, which makes more sense when you know Venice handed him its lifetime achievement award only last year. Naturally.

Woman Unknown, dir. May el-Toukhy

Remarkably, the only film directed by a woman among the twenty in the main competition, and one of the most quietly gripping premises in the entire line-up. El-Toukhy, the Danish-Egyptian director behind Queen of Hearts (2019), which won the audience award at Sundance and became Denmark’s Oscar entry, and episodes of The Crown, returns with a psychological drama set in Denmark in 1945, just after the end of Nazi occupation. Rising star Mathilde Arcel plays Marie, a young nanny preparing to marry Christian, the wealthy widower she works for, a marriage that would secure her whole future, so long as the secret of her wartime relationship with a German soldier stays buried. The film builds around the extravagant engagement dinner Marie is planning, with pieces of her past surfacing as the preparations unfold, and the history gives it real teeth, since women who had relationships with occupying soldiers were publicly shamed across post-war Europe. Carsten Bjørnlund plays Christian, and it is co-written with Maren Louise Käehne, a pairing that promises existential dread.

Possible Love, dir. Lee Chang-dong

Eight years after Burning (2018), one of the defining films of the last decade, Lee Chang-dong finally returns. Possible Love follows two married couples on opposite sides of the class divide. When Mi-ok, whose husband has just been laid off, agrees to be filmed by Ye-ji, an affluent documentary maker, the two women grow close while Mi-ok finds herself uneasily drawn to Ye-ji’s husband, and both marriages are forced to confront their hidden desires. The cast pulls together some of the biggest names in Korean cinema, reuniting Lee with Jeon Do-yeon of Secret Sunshine (2007) and Sul Kyung-gu of Peppermint Candy (1999), alongside Cho Yeo-jeong of Parasite (2019) and Zo In-sung. It is a Netflix production, which means it will reach more people than any Lee film before it. His track record includes a Venice directing prize for Oasis (2002) and two years as South Korea’s actual Minister of Culture. The favourite for the Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize, until anyone proves otherwise.

Look Back, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

Kore-eda, the director of Shoplifters (2018), which won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at Cannes, adapts the beloved one-shot manga by Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto. It follows Fujino, a small-town schoolgirl quietly convinced she is the best artist in her year, and Kyomoto, a shut-in who never comes to class but draws circles around her. A shared obsession with making manga pulls them together, and the story traces their friendship across years of collaboration, rivalry and loss, asking why anyone makes art at all. The 2024 anime version had audiences sobbing, and Kore-eda has spent thirty years making understated films about makeshift families and fragile bonds, so the material could hardly be in better hands. He shot it on 35mm across four seasons in northern Japan, with young stars Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita in the lead roles, and it is already his second film of the year after another premiered at Cannes in May. If the anime is anything to go by, everyone will be in bits.

Words – Sarah Arsalan