Venice 2025
Venice is the launch pad of the Oscar season

By Niels Jakob Kyhl Jørgensen, Ekko Filmmagasinet
August 27, 2025


Oscar suitors are lining up at the Venice Film Festival, where industry-specific media brands designate Anders Thomas Jensen's comedy as the big international bestseller.

The weather is mild and the atmosphere is tense on the opening day of the 82nd Venice Film Festival. On the one hand, the festival is presenting its most Oscar-friendly program in a long time, when heavyweights such as Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt are competing for the Golden Lion ahead of the awards ceremony next Saturday, September 6.


George Clooney is a self-absorbed star actor and Adam Sandler his ostracized agent in Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, which promises to be one of the highlights of the Venice Festival. Photo | Heyday Films

Expect to see glamour shots of names like George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield abounding online over the next few weeks – and expect to read interviews with quite a few of those same names in this magazine.

Venice may be the world’s oldest film festival, but in terms of reputation it must be considered the cheeky little brother of the Cannes Festival, with the same sense of stardom but a more Oscar-friendly location as the first of the big film festivals of the fall – closely followed by Toronto, Telluride and New York Film Festivals.

Since the programs for all four have been published before Venice opens, you can get an overview of the companies’ big Oscar hopes and start to get a sense of the situation.

On the other hand, Israel’s once again escalating war in Gaza weighs more heavily than it has at any other film festival since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023.

Demonstrators on the red carpet

On Monday – the same day that four more journalists were killed in an Israeli bomb attack – the protest group Venice4Palestine issued an open letter calling on the festival management to clearly and unequivocally distance themselves from the genocide in Gaza.

The letter has so far been signed by 1,500 filmmakers, including directors Matteo Garrone (Io capitano), Audrey Diwan (Happening) and Ken Loach (I, Daniel Blake). It comes in the wake of a similar letter that circulated during the Cannes festival.

Already on the opening day, a delegation of protesters had arrived at the red carpet with Palestinian flags and banners advertising a planned demonstration on Saturday. Years ago, climate demonstrations threatened the festival atmosphere (and were dispersed with water cannons), but the boiling planet has been relegated to the bottom of the film industry's list of concerns.

Palestine was also the main topic of the jury's press conference, where jury president Alexander Payne blatantly failed to comment on the conflict.

The film festival's artistic director, Alberto Barbera, also skillfully and strategically steered clear of declaring a position. He did point out, however, that the main competition this year includes Kaouther Ben Hania's war film The Voice of Hind Rajab.

It is about a five-year-old Palestinian girl whose heartbreaking call to the authorities went around the world after she was found dead in her family's gunned-down car in Gaza City. That film has almost become a statement of support in itself, as big names like Alfonso Cuaron, Jonathan Glazer, Rooney Mara and most recently Brad Pitt and Joaquin Phoenix have all signed on as executive producers.

Jude Law as Putin

The war in Ukraine also gets a feature film commentary on the way in the form of Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin.

Here, Paul Dano plays an ambitious advisor to Jude Law’s unscrupulous Vladimir Putin in a story that stretches from Putin’s rise to power at the beginning of the century to the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Again this year, Venice benefits from the streaming services’ ban on entry at the Cannes Festival, where in order to protect the cinema experience, they will not show films that can be streamed after just a few months.

I have been looking forward to Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein for years, and Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly with George Clooney as a self-absorbed star actor and Adam Sandler as his hunted agent looks like a rock-solid Oscar candidate.

The main film

Seen from Danish eyes, it is of course Anders Thomas Jensen’s The Last Viking that is the main film of the festival.

It brings together his usual cast of actors with Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas in the lead and has already been named by the industry-specific media brand The Hollywood Reporter as one of the program's biggest international sales.

It will have its world premiere out of competition on Saturday night, a month before the Danish premiere on October 9. And many of us are looking forward to it – for me personally, to a reunion!

If Cannes is the world championship of film art, Venice is the launch pad for Oscar season – and judging by this year's program, we are in for an exciting film season.

Trailer: Jay Kelly