As the festival buzz winds down and other major film festivals begin to take shape and galvanize public interest, the prestigious Venice Film Festival awards are slowly taking form as the jury decides who the winners will be.
This year’s jury, led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, includes filmmakers and writers from around the world. Understanding their taste and what films spoke to them is a fool’s errand, as last year’s Golden Lion winner, Father Mother Sister Brother, proved just that after being “overshadowed” by films with higher critical and audience scores.
The Golden Lion award has become more interesting over the last decade, mostly because of overlap in the awards race for films that go on to receive a Best Picture nomination (or sometimes, a win). Since 2016, three Golden Lion winners have been nominated for Best Picture, and two have won (starting with 2017’s The Shape of Water). The last time the Lion winner has crossed over to Oscar success was Poor Things (2023).
The growing influence of the international voting body within the Academy Awards and prominent festivals like Cannes and Venice offers insight into what films may appeal to those voters and beyond. Even films that don’t win the top prize, such as The Brutalist (2024) winning the Silver Lion for Best Director, portend to its Oscar chances down the line.
Regardless of what film wins what, the Venice Film Festival will certainly make a mark in this current awards season, as certain contenders and films will take this year’s wins as more momentum for their awards campaign.
Here are my predictions for the 2026 Venice Film Festival Awards:
Golden Lion: Naza
Following up on the Oscar-winning No Other Land, co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are returning to explore the fraught, violent tensions of the Gaza conflict in Naza. The film is an expose detailing the systemic powers behind the IDF’s method of killing Palestinian civilians by interviewing 24 different Israeli insiders on top of the rooftops of Tel Aviv. The film premiered to a record-breaking 24-minute standing ovation, a year after The Voice of Hind Rajab premiered to rapturous acclaim and won the Grand Jury Prize (its director, Kaouther Ben Hania, was on this year’s jury).
Grand Jury Prize: Possible Love
It’s true: oftentimes the most critically lauded films don’t win the top prize. Sometimes they go to generally divisive films, even though we’ll get an occasion where Nomadland (2020) or All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) win. Lee Chang-dong’s first film in eight years has proven to be another home run success for the celebrated auteur, as its high critical scores and positive audience reception lend to the belief that it’s time for Venice to rectify the mistake they made last year, when No Other Choice didn’t win anything. The jury is promising to be more high-minded in its taste, especially with members like Johnnie To and Francesco Casetti involved in the voting. This lends weight to Possible Love’s themes of economic inequality and the heartfelt complications of marriage, which can win over the jury, alongside its artistic sensibilities.
Special Jury Prize: Bunker
Despite its middling reviews from critics and audiences, Bunker received a warm embrace from those in attendance at the Lido. Written and directed by Florian Zeller, the film stars Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz as a married couple facing marital strife, while Bardem designs a safe bunker for a billionaire. The film’s divisive nature could make the Special Jury Prize a good fit, recognizing what people love despite the wobbly execution and questionable final act.
Silver Lion: Martin McDonagh for Wild Horse Nine
McDonagh is back at Venice for a third time, and the question lingers if he can finally win a prize outside of the Screenplay award for his film. He won Screenplay for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and while The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) came close to winning the Lion, it winning Screenplay and Best Actor felt like there was a reluctance to award a high-profile writer/director the Golden Lion award, even if the works are undeniable. Yet, the rave reviews between Venice and Telluride only solidify Wild Horse Nine as one of the best films to premiere, and a moment to recognize McDonagh the director, as his latest film is more visually engaging as a period film reckoning with America’s intervention in Chile’s presidency.
Volpi Cup for Best Actress: Mathilde Arcel for Woman Unknown
Before the festival, much was said about the lack of female-directed films in the Competition lineup, with May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown being the only film selected. At its debut, much of the critical reception focused on Mathilde Arcel’s performance. She plays Marie, a nanny who has agreed to marry a widowed wealthy man, for whom she serves, but holds a dark secret that ties her to Nazi collaborators in WWII. It’s a performance many have praised, especially as a complicated female character that is hard to discern. This could be a way for the jury to acknowledge el-Toukhy’s film, even if it doesn’t rival some of the bigger films vying for awards.
Volpi Cup for Best Actor: Robert Pattinson for Primetime
Pattinson winning Best Actor at Venice is strange, as they often don’t go toward popular global stars, but rather established, venerated actors like Toni Servillo or Vincent London. Yet, Pattinson has had such an incredible year of global hits in The Odyssey and The Drama that it would be undeniable not to reward his brilliant, uncanny performance as Chris Hansen.
Best Screenplay: The Echo Chamber
Not a huge highlight of the festival, yet the allure of Andrea Pollard’s The Echo Chamber is in its screenplay. It’s a confined narrative in the apartment of a talented artist slowly succumbing to opioid addiction, and the many women in his life affected by his situation. The film is made up of many slow, ponderous conversations about love, art, mortality, and purpose; even though it felt more overwrought with philosophical musings than a compelling narrative, that could be a way to reward the renowned Italian filmmaker.
Marcello Mastroianni Award: Furi Nanase and Rokka Okada for Look Back
Considered a breakout award for performances (sometimes by young actors), I couldn’t help but be reminded of the beautiful, resonant work by Nanase and Okada as Fijino and Kyomoto. In translating the manga, director Hirokazu Kore-eda does a marvelous job casting these two young actresses to convey the generational friendship that becomes the heart of Look Back. Their emotional development helps ground and punctuate the heartfelt whimsy, and their performances feel so natural and measured that the jury will seek to recognize Kore-eda’s film.
Article Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credit to La Biennale