82nd Venice International Film Festival

The actress and author Emanuela Fanelli, one of the most original and innovative performers in Italian cinema and television, will lead the inauguration ceremony on the night of Wednesday 27 August on the stage of Sala Grande (Palazzo del Cinema at the Lido), as well as the closing ceremony to be held on Saturday 6 September, when the winners of the Lions and the other official prizes will be announced.

 

This year the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement have been awarded to the great German director Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu the Vampyre), one of the major innovators of New German Cinema, who has never ceased from testing the limits of the film language, belying the traditional distinction between documentary and fiction, and to the legendary American actress Kim Novak one of the most beloved icons of an entire era of Hollywood films, whose image will remain forever linked to the dual characters she played in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which became the role of her life.

 

La Grazia, written and directed by the Oscar®-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (The Hand of God, The Great Beauty, Il divo), and starring Toni Servillo and Anna Ferzetti, is the opening film, in a world premiere in Competition (27 August 2025).

 

The Festival will have a double Pre-opening on Tuesday, August 26, with the program in the Sala Darsena (Palazzo del Cinema) at the Lido enriched by a new special preview.
At 6 pm will be screened in world premiere Origin (30′) by the famous French photographer, director and environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which is the extended version of the introductory short film of the section Natural Intelligence (Arsenale) of the Biennale Architettura 2025, curated by Carlo Ratti.
The film expresses the fascination for a territory, the lagoon of Venice, located between land and sea, encouraging us to look at the nature that makes it up with new eyes, in order to preserve it at its best.
The screening of Origin – which will be followed by a dialogue between the director, the curator of the Biennale Architettura and the artistic director of the Biennale Cinema – will precede the screening, at 9 pm, of Queen Kelly (1929) by Erich von Stroheim and starring the era’s most glamorous film star Gloria Swanson, which will be shown in a new version restored incorporating newly discovered materials and accompanied by a new original score by Eli Denson, performed live by the Syntax Ensemble.

 

Line-up

 

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