THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

The Venice Film Festival, the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica of the Venice Biennale, is eleven days of new films on the Lido, the long barrier island of the Venetian lagoon, in late August and early September: a competition for the Golden Lion and a handful of other sections, screened in the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi and the halls beside it, with directors and actors typically at the afternoon and evening screenings in the Sala Grande and the red carpet before it.

It was the first film festival in history. It opened on the night of 6 August 1932 with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, shown on the terrace of the Excelsior.

The Excelsior Terrace

The Biennale had shown art in Venice since 1895, and in the 1930s it added music, theatre and cinema. The film festival was created in 1932 by Giuseppe Volpi, Luciano de Feo and Antonio Maraini; Volpi, Mussolini’s former minister of finance, was made president of the Biennale the same year. By one account the idea was to bring visitors back to the Lido after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The first festival ran to 21 August and gave no prizes. The audience voted instead, and named Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the most original film, Fredric March its best actor and Helen Hayes its best actress.

There was no festival in 1933. In 1934 it was declared annual, and the first official awards, the Mussolini Cups, were given; the films that year were shown in the garden of the Excelsior. The Palazzo del Cinema, built in record time in the Modernist style of the day to the design of the engineer Luigi Quagliata, was inaugurated on 10 August 1937 for the fifth edition. The festivals of 1940 to 1942, held away from the Lido, are regarded as if they did not happen. It resumed in 1946, in September for the first time, by agreement with the newly reborn festival at Cannes, and in 1947 was held in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace, with a record ninety thousand present.

The Golden Lion was introduced in 1949, as the Lion of Saint Mark, after the symbol of the ancient Republic of Venice, and took its present name in 1954. In the early 1950s the festival counted more than a hundred thousand spectators; an enlargement of the Palazzo for five thousand seats was planned and never finished. From 1969 to 1979 no prizes were given, and in 1973, 1977 and 1978 there was no festival. The Golden Lion did not return until 1980.

The Lido had its grand hotels before it had its festival. The Excelsior, Moorish in manner, opened on the Adriatic shore in 1908. The Grand Hotel des Bains, built in 1900, is remembered for Thomas Mann’s stay in 1911, which gave him Death in Venice; Visconti filmed the novella there in 1971, and for years the stars of the festival stayed there. It closed in 2010 and in 2024 was still awaiting renovation.

The Eleven Days

The competition, Venezia 83 in 2026, is the heart of it, and the Golden Lion goes to its best film. Beside it run films out of competition, the Orizzonti, Venice Classics and Venice Immersive, among others, and two independent sections, the Settimana Internazionale della Critica and the Giornate degli Autori. Films are shown in their original language, with Italian and English subtitles. In 2026 five juries gave the awards at a ceremony on the closing Saturday.

The Sala Grande, with 1,032 seats, is where the main screenings and the awards take place. The red carpet can be seen from the pedestrian area outside, and is shown on a giant screen; no ticket is needed to watch it. About three thousand journalists come.

Gravity, Birdman, Spotlight, La La Land, The Shape of Water, Roma, Joker, Nomadland, Poor Things and The Brutalist all had their first showings in Venice before they won Oscars. Alberto Barbera has directed the festival since 2011, as he did from 1998 to 2002.

In 2026, the 83rd edition, it ran from 2 to 12 September, opening with Danny Boyle’s Ink and closing with Giovanni Veronesi’s God Laughs. Maggie Gyllenhaal led the jury over twenty-one films, and the Golden Lion went to May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown (Kvinde ukendt); the Silver Lion, the Grand Jury Prize, to Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love. Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney received Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement. The public bought 117,656 tickets, fourteen per cent more than in 2025, already a record year.

What to Know

In 2025 and 2026 it ran for eleven days and ended on a Saturday: in 2025 from 27 August to 6 September, in 2026 from 2 to 12 September. The 2027 dates have not been announced.

The public may attend selected screenings; some are kept for the accredited. In 2026 tickets were sold only online, at labiennale.org, from the middle of August, once the daily programme was published, and were personal and non-transferable; a seat at the 7:30 pm screening in the Sala Grande cost €50. A subscription holds the same seat in one time slot for the whole festival; in 2026 one for the 7:00 pm screenings in the Sala Grande cost €500 in the stalls and €1,600 in the gallery, and was applied for in June. Popular titles, an attendee warns, “will go out in seconds.”

The festival publishes only that “formal attire is recommended” for the gala screenings in the Sala Grande. Black tie for the evening premieres is the Court’s choice, and a lounge suit by day.

From Marco Polo airport the Alilaguna boats, Red and Blue, go to Lido S. Maria Elisabetta; a private water taxi takes about forty minutes to the Excelsior. From the station at Santa Lucia the vaporetto crosses to the Lido. Stay at the Excelsior, which calls itself the festival’s home since 1932, or book through the Lido’s hotel consortium, Venezia e il suo Lido. The Des Bains is shut.

The mistake is to arrive at the last minute. Doors close ten minutes before the screening, and no one is let in once it has begun. A ticket does not promise the red carpet either: passage on it “cannot be guaranteed”.

The Court

The Venice Film Festival is not the Court’s own. Seats in the Sala Grande for the evening premieres are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay on the Lido or in the city, and the table afterward. The US Open is played in New York in the same weeks.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.