The competition for the Golden Lion at Venezia 83 is unusually loaded with returning masters, but the sharpest story on paper belongs to a director who has said nothing for seven years. No competition film has screened as of this writing, so what follows is a craft-led forecast rather than a review: an argument about method, premise and casting, not about scenes nobody has yet seen.

The prediction is Possible Love, Lee Chang-dong’s first feature since Burning in 2018. The case begins with what Lee reliably does better than almost anyone working: he stages ordinary lives until a moral fault line opens under them, and he trusts the viewer to feel the tremor before it is named. His patient realism — long, unhurried scenes that accrue weight rather than spend it — is the kind of interior devastation that reads on the Lido as gravity rather than flash. He reunites Jeon Do-yeon, a Cannes Best Actress laureate for Secret Sunshine, with Sul Kyung-gu, and pairs them with Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong; the ensemble is built for exactly the close-grained emotional excavation Lee’s cinema demands. Add the narrative pressure of a broken silence — a filmmaker of his stature returning after so long is a story a jury can feel — and the argument becomes hard to dismiss. This year’s jury tilts sympathetic: Johnnie To sits among the members, an Asian-auteur sensibility inside the room, alongside a President in Maggie Gyllenhaal who has built her own directing career on interiority. None of this guarantees a masterpiece. It does describe a film with the highest ceiling in the field, made by a director who has never released anything careless.

The first dark horse is Bucking Fastard, Werner Herzog’s competition entry with Rooney and Kate Mara as sisters. Herzog received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 2024, yet the competitive prize has always eluded him — and that gap is itself a jury-narrative hook, the kind of unfinished business festivals occasionally choose to close. A Herzog film built on the raw kinship of two sisters, in his register of the sublime and the deranged, is unpredictable in the best sense: it could detonate at the Lido or curdle, and juries have rewarded his controlled madness before.

The second dark horse comes from the opposite temperament. Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, with Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon, offers pure formal control where Herzog offers legend. Pallaoro directed Charlotte Rampling to the Coppa Volpi at Venice 2017 for Hannah; his cinema is a precision instrument for actresses, composed to the millimetre. If the jury wants rigor over rhetoric, his is the name.

What the prediction misses is the obvious thing: nobody has seen any of these films. A forecast built on method and casting can be undone by a single miscalibrated film, and Lee’s very patience is a risk — the same slowness that becomes profound can, on a bad night, read as inert. The field is also deep with proven winners: Koreeda, McDonagh, Moretti, Zeller. Any prediction here is a bet on reputation holding, not on a screening that has happened.

The verdict lands on 12 September 2026 on the Venice Lido, when Maggie Gyllenhaal’s jury announces the Golden Lion. MCM will be covering the ceremony live, testing every forecast against what the films actually turn out to be.

Tags: awards, Venice Film Festival, 2026, Lee Chang-dong, Golden Lion, Possible Love, Werner Herzog

Why Lee Chang-dong’s seven-year silence could end with a Golden Lion

More Like This

Why the Silver Lion should follow the steadiest hand in Competition: Koreeda

Coppa Volpi Watch: Why Alicia Vikander Is the Actress to Beat at Venice

Best Screenplay at Venice 83: McDonagh Returns to the Prize That Suits Him

Coppa Volpi Best Actor: Vincent Lindon’s Working-Man Realism Is the One to Beat

How Minotaur brought Andrey Zvyagintsev from exile to the Cannes Grand Prix

Kristoffer Borgli drops Zendaya and Pattinson into a wedding that curdles in The Drama

Discussion