Updated

Updated · CNN · Sep 3

Venice Film Festival Opens for 10 Days as 2 Female-Directed Films Compete for Golden Lion

Updated

Updated · CNN · Sep 3

Venice Film Festival Opens for 10 Days as 2 Female-Directed Films Compete for Golden Lion

Q: What bizarre, surreal elements earned Werner Herzog's new twin-focused thriller a massive seven-minute standing ovation at its premiere?

The ovation was driven by *Bucking Fastard’s* deliberately surreal portrait of two sisters who function almost as one person. Kate and Rooney Mara play Jean and Joan Holbrooke, women who speak in perfect unison, dress alike, move in lockstep and even fall in love with the same man, played by Orlando Bloom. Critics singled out the film’s strangest episodes: the sisters’ obsessive threesome-turned-stalking saga, their synchronized everyday routines rendered as deadpan comedy, and their increasingly dreamlike drift through courtrooms, city housing and rural Ireland. Reviews also pointed to bizarre set pieces including porn-like moaning outside a lover’s window, arson, a wedding crash, and the sisters’ insistence that compromising photos cannot exist online “because we do not have the internet.” What pushed the film fully into Herzogian surrealism was its final movement: the twins’ fixation on digging and extending a tunnel through a mountain in hopes it leads to the Orkney Islands, capped by a cave-centered finale. That blend of fairy-tale logic, obsessive romance, cave mythology and the Maras’ uncanny synchronized performances is what made the premiere feel so unusual — and helped earn the nearly seven-minute standing ovation in Venice.

3 articles · Updated · CNN · Sep 3

Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” about Rupert Murdoch’s early years and the acquisition of The Sun, opened the 2026 Venice Film Festival as the 10-day event began on the Lido.
Two films directed by women — May el-Toukhy’s “Woman Unknown” and Rachel Szor’s “NAZA” — made the main competition lineup, drawing criticism over the festival’s gender imbalance.
Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal said the shortfall reflects a systemic financing problem for women filmmakers and questioned who gets to decide what work is valued.
George and Amal Clooney, Penélope Cruz, Robert Pattinson and Patrick Schwarzenegger are among the expected attendees, underscoring Venice’s dual role as an Oscar bellwether and a major fashion showcase.