by Helen Barlow
If Australian films are thin on the ground at the 83rd Venice Film Festival — there are two features including Russell Crowe’s music documentary What Love Builds — the festival makes up with the presence of major Australian stars.
Before Thursday’s announcements, it was already known that the opening film will be Danny Boyle’s Ink, about Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 acquisition of the struggling newspaper The Sun and how together with editor Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), he turned it into Britain’s most influential and best-selling tabloid. Guy Pearce, who had been at the 2024 festival with The Brutalist, plays Murdoch in the film, which is based on a script by James Graham, who had also written the original award-winning stage play.
Also competing is Casey Affleck’s third directing effort, the Gothic mystery Company, which stars Nick Nolte alongside Aussies Adelaide Clemens and Ben Mendelsohn, as well as Scoot McNairy, Emily Alyn Lind and Caylee Cowan. Set on a winter night in 1975, the film follows Clemens’ mysterious Evelyn, who arrives uninvited at a holiday gathering and tells the story of Tom, an aging hermit who rescued a stranded actress during a Colorado blizzard more than 20 years earlier.
Geoffrey Rush plays a Vietnam veteran in Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto’s competition film Mr Nelson, Did You Kill People? a co-production between Japan, the US, Thailand and Vietnam. Based on the account of an African-American Vietnam veteran, played by Rodney Hicks, it details his wartime experiences and the struggles he faced when he returned home.
Screening out-of-competition is Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo’s Sydney-shot Place to Be, starring Ellen Burstyn, Taika Waititi, Pamela Anderson and Aussies David Wenham and Murray Bartlett. The drama follows the unlikely friendship of an elderly woman (Burstyn now 93, who will also receive a career tribute) and a middle-aged man (Waititi) as they travel from Chicago to New York to return a lost racing pigeon.
The second Australian Venice feature, Agata the Writer, competes in the sidebar Giornate degli Autori. The debut film by Polish-born, Sydney-based visual artist and filmmaker, Kuba Dorabialski, the film stars Mia Wasikowska as a Polish-Australian satirical novelist who travels from Sydney to Sarajevo to write a novel about the Bosnian war, only to be challenged by locals.
In his announcements of the official selection, Venice director Alberto Barbera noted that documentaries represent a huge part of the programme. This includes Crowe’s What Love Builds, which chronicles the performances and tours of his band Indoor Garden Party (what happened to TOFOG?) across Europe, the US, the UK and Australia. Crowe has said that he will attend the festival as have Noel and Liam Gallagher, who will present Don’t Look Back in Anger, [left] which follows the recent Oasis reunion world tour and is touted as featuring the first joint interviews with the brothers in over 25 years. The brainchild of Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight, the film is directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace (Shut Up and Play the Hits, Meet Me in the Bathroom).
Alex Gibney will premiere his long-gestating, four-hour Musk, about the tech giant and richest person in the world, Elon Musk. It’s one of the most eagerly anticipated documentaries of the year. The American filmmaker will be at the festival alongside his politically-minded compatriots, two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple with Union Town, about the travails of delivery workers in New York; Russian-American Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends Part II – Exile, her follow-up to her 2025 film following Russia’s crackdown on independent journalists; and Laura Poitras’s short film They’re Here, which she directed with Rachel Mueller and features unseen footage of the Minnesota protests against President Trump’s controversial ICE raids.
On the more commercial front — and bound to be a hit with adventure-loving Australians — is Everest: The Other Side directed by the intrepid duo, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who won the best documentary Oscar for Free Solo in 2019. Their new film provides an intimate portrait of elite ski mountaineers, Hilaree Nelson and Jim Morrison, as they fall in love while attempting the pinnacle of their sport – to climb and ski the direct North Face of Mount Everest, the most difficult and dangerous climb on the mountain. While thousands have summited Everest via Nepal’s southeast ridge, only a handful have ever reached the top by this route, and no one has successfully skied down. Already known for their extraordinary feats in the mountains and no strangers to loss, Nelson and Morrison stake everything on this daunting challenge.
Probably the most anticipated competition entry is Irish director Martin McDonagh’s [above, on set with Tom Waits] black comedy Wild Horse Nine, starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as veteran CIA officers, who, ahead of the 1973 Chilean coup, are sent far from the action to Easter Island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey co-star. Given that McDonagh’s last two features Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin won major awards in Venice and beyond, Wild Horse Nine could well follow suit.
Primetime, starring and produced by Robert Pattinson, could also make a splash. Directed by documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim it follows Pattinson as Chris Hansen, an NBC correspondent who in 2006 made a name for himself catching suspected child predators with the help of law enforcement and a team of decoys pretending to be minors online.
French director Florian Zeller (The Father, The Son) also competes with the psychological thriller Bunker. Real life couple Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz star together as a couple whose marriage becomes troubled after Bardem’s celebrated architect agrees to build a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire. (Could he be based on Elon Musk? We shall see!) Stephen Graham, Paul Dano and Patrick Schwarzenegger co-star.
After presenting his films in Cannes, Italian auteur Nanni Moretti will return to his homeland festival’s competition with the romantic drama It Will Happen Tonight, starring Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca.
Werner Herzog, after being denied a competition berth in Cannes, Venice will now premiere his new feature Bucking Fastard. The film, which marks the first time sisters Rooney and Kate Mara have acted together, also features Orlando Bloom and Domhnall Gleeson.
Of the further three Italian films in the competition, Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, based on an unfinished script by Bernardo Bertolucci seems the stand-out. It stars Alicia Vikander and Luca Marinelli as enraptured lovers, while Susan Sarandon also appears. The clearly commercial God Laughs [below] by Giovanni Veronesi and starring Pierfrancesco Favino as a humorous 17th century friar, is the closing film screening out of competition. Two Italian veterans also have films screening away from the competition: Gianni Amelio has Painless starring Alessandro Borghi, while Mario Martone has Trick starring last year’s best actor winner, Toni Servillo (La Grazia).
Likewise, France has three competition films. Though in Stephane Brize’s A Good Little Soldier, his fourth film about troubled workers, Italian star Alba Rohrwacher plays a woman navigating a corporate environment. Cedric Kahn will premiere A Place to Heal set in a French public hospital’s adolescent psychiatry unit, while Nicolas Pariser’s A Bit Before Midnight stars Melvil Poupaud as a man examining his life after his father dies.
Two of Asia’s greats will compete with their latest films: Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda with Look Back, his live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s coming-of-age manga; and Korea’s Lee Chang-dong with Possible Love, a melodrama starring Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung and Parasite’s Cho Yeo-jeong.
As well as her duties as competition jury head, Maggie Gyllenhaal will present her short film Flesh Impact, a Marilyn Monroe tribute starring Dakota Johnson and Ellen Burstyn (again).
Venice regular George Clooney will also receive a career tribute, and will surely make it fun, as is his way.
