Venice 2026 preview – Lovers in the Blue Night; The Difficult Bride; Our Share of Sand and other films 

Our preview of the Venice International Film Festival which begins shortly…

IN A WEEK’S TIME, the island of Lido, in Venice will give itself over to global cinema, as the Venice International Film Festival gets under way for its 83th edition, running from Wednesday, September 2 to Saturday, October 12. 

Here are the films on our radar… We have yet to see any of these…

Lovers in the Blue Night – desire, belonging and bridal rebellion 

Writer-director Anuparna Roy returns to Orizzonti (this strand translates literally as Horizons and is for emerging global filmmakers) – with ‘Lovers in the Blue Night’, her second feature after her award-winning Venice debut, ‘Songs of Forgotten Trees’ (see interview links below), which also featured at London Film Festival last October.  Her latest film is set on Mumbai’s margins, as it brings together four migrants – a closeted husband, his bar-worker wife, a small-time thief and a pimp – in a nocturnal story of love, survival, identity and the ache to belong. Its multilingual world and intimate focus suggest a tough yet tender portrait of people whom the city too easily overlooks. It has its first public screening on Wednesday, September 9.

The Difficult Bride – Venice film nation history

Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain also enters Orizzonti with ‘The Difficult Bride’. In contemporary Dhaka, a bride-to-be preparing for her dream wedding begins to lose control of her body as beauty rituals, social pressure and supernatural forces collide. What starts as bridal preparation becomes an unsettling search for freedom. Hossain herself describes her feature as a psychological horror film and it is set in a traditional beauty salon, named Mayfair Beauty Parlour. This appears to be the first time that a film from Bangladesh has been in an official competition section, we believe. The lead part of Zaineen is played by a newcomer but the film also features one of Bangladesh’s best known actors, Azmeri Haque Badhon who starred in the Cannes’ officially selected, ‘Noor’ from 2021. The film heads to both Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) September 10-20, and London Film Festival, October 7-18. It has its world premiere on Sunday, September 6.

Our Share of Sand – British director’s deep dive  

At International Critics’  Week, a sidebar to La Biennale di Venezia, as it is officially known –  Brit Shalini Adnani’s debut ‘Our Share of Sand’ is an India-UK-Greece production with a potent coming-of-age premise. Twelve-year-old Maya returns to rural India with her mother and is drawn into the world of her estranged father’s sand-mining business. After a worker’s death makes her a key witness, loyalty gives way to unease as she confronts family silence, exploitation and complicity. It appears on paper to combine environmental urgency with a sharply observed moral drama. The film screens for the first time on Saturday, September 5.

Venice Classics: Rahul Bose back in the frame

Dev Benegal’s ‘English, August‘ returns in a restored 4K version. The 1994 adaptation of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel, starring Rahul Bose, follows an elite, Westernised young civil servant posted to small-town India. Its darkly comic take on bureaucracy, alienation and post-colonial identity helped define India’s independent cinema of the 1990s; this restoration offers a new generation the chance to catch up. This film has its first public screening in Venice on Wednesday, September 9.

Documentary – high peaks

The US-China-Nepal backed ‘Everest: The Other Side’ appears in the Out of Competition directed by Elizabeth Chai Vaserhelyi and Jimmy Chin.  Screens on Thursday, September 3.

Venice Immersive: epic worlds and urgent art

Director Anand Kishore’s ‘Anokhya: The Origin‘, produced by AR Rahman’s immersive studio, places viewers inside a mythic world inspired by Indian epics. A courtesan trained in the ancient 64 arts seeks forbidden knowledge from a reclusive sage, crossing a sensorial Himalayan landscape towards a life-changing encounter. 
Well-known international artist Nalini Malani’s ‘Of Woman Born’ brings her enveloping “Animation Chamber” to the Immersive Cinema programme. Drawing on the Greek myth of Orestes, its projected images and women’s voices connect ancient injustice with present-day conflict and the recurring absence of accountability. Together, these works show Venice looking beyond the conventional screen – while South Asian artists continue to expand what cinema can contain. Malani is one of the first artists in India to work with video.

There are daily programme of screenings from the opening of the festival next week – but it is on Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio, another island and connected by a three-minute waterbus. Malani’s work is at Zattare and connected by another waterbus.

More generally…

The documentary about the British band Oasis reforming and embarking on a world tour makes a world premiere at Venice in the Out of Competition non-fiction section. Called ‘Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger’ and directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, it has footage of never before seen rehearsals during their 25-year reunion tour and backstage film and reactions of its global fanbase. It hits Venice on September 5.  
Among the widely anticipated narrative fiction English language premieres in Venice is ‘Ink’ which is loosely based around the entry of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch into the British newspaper scene with his purchase of The Sun in 1969. Danny Boyle directs and it is the first time a film of his will appear in Competition there. It premieres on September 9.
Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem feature in ‘Bunker’ written by French sensation playwright, Florian Zeller, who has more recently moved into writing and directing for the screen. The stars play a couple caught cold in an emotional crisis when a billionaire asks Bardem’s architect character to design a survivalist bunker. Screens first on September 8. Acclaimed veteran director Werner Herzog, 83, now brings his ‘Bucking Fastard’ – about two sisters who act in unison, to the festival.  It screens first publicly on September 3.
Sixteen films in all also compete in the Orizzonti section. Among the other notable films from the West appearing Out of Competition is Paul Scharder’s (‘Taxi Driver‘) latest ‘The Basics of Philosophy’.