20/07/2026 - The 41st edition of the Venice Film Festival’s sidebar welcomes two European co-productions in competition, and two Italian titles out of competition are set to open and close the event

Venice International Film Critics’ Week is approaching its 41st edition (running 2 - 12 September) which boasts an array of world premieres. The line-up is notably lacking in European works, since only two of the seven debut feature films in competition are European co-productions, not counting the two Italian films which are set to open and close the event.

Il grande Giaffa by Marco Santi will open the Venice Film Festival’s parallel section. International Film Critics’ Week general delegate Beatrice Fiorentino describes the movie as “the tragedy of a man without class who’ll do anything just to be seen”, with the cast of Santi’s debut film starring Edoardo Pesce, Carlotta Gamba and Barbara Chichiarelli. The showcase will be brought to a close by Rider, which is directed by Roan Johnson (The First on the List, Feather) and by musician and music producer Dade (Davide Pavanello), who composed the award-winning score for Gloria! in league with Margherita Vicario. Rider is an urban noir grafted onto a coming-of-age story which “reinvents the musical from the present, finding rhythm and a new way of thinking and seeing, in rap, rhyme and music”.

Standing out in competition is Before the War by Paris-based, Italian-French director Tommaso Usberti, which tells the story of twenty-three-year-old Guido who lives in a town in Northern Italy. He’s earned the respect of his peers by partaking of the violence that’s part and parcel of his racist and misogynistic background. But something changes when he meets a young Kosovar immigrant called Sonia.

The Indian-British-Greek co-production Our Share of Sand marks the directorial debut of Shalini Adnani, a filmmaker of Indian origin who was born in Chile and is now based in London. The film follows twelve-year-old Maya who returns to India with her mother to reunite with her father, who’s a sand-mining entrepreneur. In a world of exploitation and economic precariousness, Maya forges a bond with a young worker.

The H@llow Man by Tunisian director Kamel Laaridhi imagines 2059 to be a place where implanted bio-chips regulate memories and suppress emotions. Fiorentino calls the work “a poetic bomb disguised as science fiction, a Dantesque journey which turns cinema into the last life raft”.

The End of Times by the Colombian duo Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas is a film blending fiction and documentary. The protagonist, Salomé, revisits decades of family videos in an attempt to understand her mother’s sadness, uncovering a past of exploitation and violence rooted in Colombian and Latin American history. Also from Colombia, Meteorite by Sebastián Múnera (triumphant in Malaga and Cartagena’s Work in Progress sections) follows two women tied together by a deep friendship who smuggle mobile phones into a regional prison. One of their runs takes them through an amusement park built on the grounds of a drug trafficker’s former estate…

Brazil, for its part, is offering up London by Victor Di Marco and Márcio Picoli, which revolves around a disabled young man who has forged his independence by working as a dominator in a fetish club alongside two friends who are also disabled. The competition is rounded off by Zoom In, Zoom Out by Chinese filmmaker Dong Jie, which focuses on young game designer, Shi, who embarks on a difficult journey across the city in search of his missing flatmate, Gao.

Like all the other debut fiction feature films presented across the festival’s various competitive sections (Official Selection, Independent and Parallel Sections), the afore-mentioned International Critics’ Week movies are also competing for the “Luigi De Laurentiis” Future Lion Award for Best Debut Film.

The selected films are as follows:

Competition

Our Share of Sand - Shalini Adnani (India/UK/Greece)
London - Victor Di Marco, Márcio Picoli (Brazil)
Zoom In, Zoom Out - Dong Jie (China)
The H@llow Man - Kamel Laaridhi (Tunisia)
Meteorite - Sebastián Múnera (Colombia)
The End of Times - Bibiana Rojas Gómez, Juan David Cárdenas (Colombia)
Before the War - Tommaso Usberti (France/Italy)

Out of Competition

Il grande Giaffa - Marco Santi (Italy, opening film)
Rider - Roan Johnson, Davide Pavanello (Italy, closing film)

SIC@SIC Short Italian Cinema

Competition

Dove le lacrime aspettano - Caterina Bertini, Blu Diego Fasoli (Italy)
E-I-E-I-O - Noemi Arfuso (Italy)
Granchità - Anaïs Landriscina, Chiara Toffoletto (Italy)
Gusci - Elisa Chiari, Francesca Trovato (Italy)
Puca - Sara Scalera (Italy)
Revolver - Paoli De Luca (Italy)
Se mai le cose - Giulia Cosentino (Italy/France)

Out of Competition

Les Métamorphoses, au féminin - Maria Giménez Cavallo (Italy/France/USA, opening short film)
Un breve incontro - Liryc Dela Cruz (Italy, closing short film)

(Translated from Italian)