Venice hands out a Lion; New York refuses to rank anything

Two of the autumn’s major film festivals open thirteen days apart, and they are built on opposite answers to the same question: should a festival tell you which film was best?

Venice says yes

The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs 2 to 12 September 2026 on the Lido. It has a competition — twenty titles in the line-up announced on 23 July — and a jury chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal, with Kaouther Ben Hania, Daniel Blumberg, Francesco Casetti, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat and Johnnie To. At the end of it, seven people award a Golden Lion.

It opens with Ink, by Danny Boyle, and closes with Giovanni Veronesi’s God Laughs. Honorary Golden Lions go to Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney. In competition: Werner Herzog, Martin McDonagh, Hirokazu Koreeda, Lee Chang-dong, Nanni Moretti, Florian Zeller, Shinya Tsukamoto. The longest film is Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Dau, at 210 minutes.

New York says no

The New York Film Festival opens on 25 September. It has no competition, no jury and no top prize. What it has is a Main Slate — 32 films this year, 17 of them by directors making their Main Slate debut — and the selection itself is the whole statement.

Which one tells you more

A Golden Lion is a very good predictor of distribution and a poor predictor of what you will want to watch. It is one verdict, produced by seven people who spent eleven days in the same screening rooms, and it compresses a fortnight of disagreement into a single name.

A slate with no ranking cannot do that, which is its weakness and its point: nothing in it is presented as the winner, so every title in it has to be argued for individually. It also means a New York audience gets no shortcut — you cannot show up for «the one that won», because there isn’t one.

The overlap is the interesting part

Venice runs 2 to 12 September. NYFF runs 25 September to 12 October. The gap is thirteen days, which in festival terms is nothing: a film that premieres on the Lido this week can be on a New York screen with the reviews already written, the discourse already formed, and the audience already told what to think.

That is the argument for seeing the ones nobody has ranked yet.