Del Toro, Lanthimos, and Bigelow at the Venice Film Festival with 5 Oscars and 9 Golden Lions

Mexican Guillermo del Toro, Greek Yorgos Lanthimos , and Americans Kathryn Bigelow, Noah Baumbach, and Jim Jarmusch will compete, among others, for the Golden Lion at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, which presented a spectacular lineup of films this Tuesday, also out of competition and in other categories.

Among the filmmakers whose films will be screened at the Lido, from August 27 to September 6, are no fewer than five Oscar winners, three of them women: Del Toro, Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Charlie Kaufman, Laura Poitras, as well as nine Golden Lions, including two for their career, those of Marco Bellocchio and Werner Herzog.

Frankenstein (Del Toro), Begonia (Lanthimos), A House of Dynamite (Bigelow), Jay Kelly (Baumbach), Father Mother Sister Brother (Jarmusch), The Wizard of the Kremlin (Olivier Assayas) and The Smashing Machine (Ben Safdie) were the most notable titles announced by the director of the Mostra, Alberto Barbera, at a press conference.

The "highly anticipated" and "spectacular" film by the Mexican, according to Barbera, is one of the big bets of the edition by a filmmaker who already won the Golden Lion with The Shape of the Sgua , 2017, which also added four Oscars (best film, director, script and soundtrack).

The festival will be inaugurated on the afternoon of August 27 with La grazia , the latest film by Paolo Sorrentino , who has shot quickly after his Parthenope (2024) to seek the 'Golden Lion', two years after trying with his most personal work, È stata la mano di Dio, Silver Lion in 2023.

Lanthimos will compete with Bugonia , a film about conspiracy delusions that will delve into his fruitful relationship with Emma Stone, while Bigelow returns to Venice after competing in 2008 with The Hurt Locker , with which she became the first woman to win an Oscar for best director.

Jay Kelly , a comedy starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler, who play an actor in crisis and his manager on a trip through Europe, has a top-notch cast, while Ben Safdie's film is a biography of wrestler Mark Kerr, played by Dwayne Johnson, who shares the bill with Emily Blunt.

Julia Roberts is coming to Venice for the first time, accompanied by Luca Guadagnino, to present, out of competition, After the Hunt , a thriller inspired by the MeToo movement, in which she shares the lead role with Andrew Garfield and which marks the director's return to the Mostra after Call Me by Your Name (2017).

Also in that section, American director Julian Schnabel will present In the End of Dante , a film with a dazzling cast that includes Israeli Gal Gadot, known for her role as Wonder Woman, Gerard Butler and the legendary Al Pacino, who also stars in Dead Man's Wire , by Gus Van Sant.

Among the out-of-competition documentaries is Our Land , by Lucrecia Martel, which, according to Barbera, has required "many years to complete the investigations and find a way to reconstruct the murder" of indigenous Javier Chocobar.

The Spanish representation will be led by director Jaime Claret Muxart and the tireless Carmen Maura , while filmmaker Javier Espada will present the documentary Memoria de los olvidados about Luis Buñuel.

Maura will return to Venice as the lead in Moroccan director Maryam Touzani's film Calle Málaga , in the Venice Spotlight section, while Claret will compete with her debut film Estrany riu (Strange River), inspired by her own family travels, in the Horizontes section.

Puerto Rican Bad Bunny will participate in that same section with the film Barrio Triste , as one of the characters in the film directed by Colombian-American Stillz, and Ecuadorian cinema will also make its debut in that section with 'Hiedra', by Ana Cristina Barragán.