Venice 2026 Opens Into a Culture War
- Triston Grant
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
The world’s oldest film festival opened Wednesday with the usual promise of glamour. The sharper story was already waiting underneath it: who gets to decide which lives are serious enough to become cinema.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs from September 2 through September 12. Danny Boyle’s Ink, a drama about Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun, opened the festival. George Clooney received a lifetime achievement award. Politics, media power and the future of the film industry arrived before the first red-carpet photographs had finished circulating.
The red carpet is not outside politics
Venice has long sold a fantasy of culture suspended above ordinary life. Stars arrive by boat. Couture becomes news. A standing ovation becomes an awards campaign. Yet the machinery that turns attention into prestige is political even when nobody gives a speech.
A festival selects whose work is seen, which stories are financed, whose suffering is legible and which artists are treated as universal. Those decisions do not stop being political because they occur beside photographers and luxury sponsors.
Who still gets called high art
Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal used the opening to describe the barriers facing women directors as systemic. Only two of the 21 films in the main competition are directed or co-directed by women. Festival director Alberto Barbera pointed to the smaller number of submissions from women, but that answer leaves the deeper question intact: who gets the money, institutional backing and freedom required to submit a major film in the first place?
The language of high art often sounds neutral only because the people empowered to define it have been treated as neutral. Stories by women, racial minorities and filmmakers outside dominant industries are still asked to prove their importance before they are allowed to prove their craft.
A festival full of arguments
This year’s program is steeped in conflict. Films address Gaza, wartime journalism in Ukraine, immigration enforcement in the United States and the afterlife of Soviet power. NAZA, a documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is scheduled to bring reporting about civilian deaths in Gaza into the main competition.
That does not mean every film becomes a manifesto. It means cinema remains one of the places where societies decide whose reality deserves attention. A red carpet can amplify that decision, but it cannot make the decision apolitical.
Why Venice still matters
The glamour is not a distraction from the festival’s power. It is part of the power. Venice can turn a film into a global conversation, an actor into an awards favorite and a political gesture into an image seen around the world.
The most revealing question this year may not be which title wins the Golden Lion. It may be whether an institution built to recognize artistic importance is willing to examine how narrowly it has defined importance in the first place.
