The projects for the upcoming Venice Gap-Financing Market have been unveiled (32 feature-length fiction) and there’ll be several listed here projects that we’ll discuss at length next year when they start hitting the festival circuit of 2026 and especially, 2027. The 12th edition has some major auteurs from the world of cinema including Austria’s Ulrich Seidl who after his long awaited Rimini (2022) and Sparta (2022) comes to us with Distances. The logline sounds intriguing – Journalist Carl Schwert has always been interested in disaster. He has travelled to dark tourism destinations, meeting people who spend their spare time visiting prisons where captives were tortured, disaster zones, genocide memorial sites and slums. In between research trips he lives with his wife Sabine in Vienna. She no longer leaves the house for fear of infection. Gradually, Schwert loses touch with reality and his life becomes increasingly unhinged. German director Emily Atef’s English-language debut Call Me Queen is already in post (with Eliane Umuhire, Denise Gough, Dominic West and Laurent Lafitte) this depicts a friendship between an Irish journalist in Kenya and a Rwandan woman, who pair up to combat the AIDS crisis in the 1990s. Argentina’s Luis Ortega (who saw Kill the Jockey compete in Venice last year) will bring Magnetized to the market – he coined it as a story about a priest that smokes crack and, while high, gives enamouring speeches. Also in the mix we find the next generation in filmmakers Sofia Alaoui, Babak Jalali and Kamila Andini with their latest. Here are the fiction offerings:
A Town in Nova Scotia (United Kingdom) by Babak Jalali
A White House (Italy, France) by Francesco Romano
Afonso’s Smile (Portugal, Luxembourg, Italy) by João Pedro Rodrigues
Amapola (Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico, Chile) by Ana Cristina Barragán
Anime Trasparenti (Echoes of light) (Italy, Germany) by Luca Lucchesi
Arru (Norway, Sweden, Finland) by Elle Sofe Sara
Athos 2643 (Germany) by David Wnendt
Call Me Queen by Emily Atef
Culebra Cut (Panama, France, Chile) by Ana Elena Tejera
Distances (Austria, Germany, France) by Ulrich Seidl
Dog Legs (Chile, Colombia, Germany) by Matías Rojas Valencia
Emerald Butterfly (The Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, UK) by Martin Koolhoven
Forough: Let us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (UK, Denmark, Greece, France) by Tina Gharavi
Four Seasons in Java (Indonesia, The Netherlands, Norway, France, Germany, Singapore) by Kamila Andini
Heirloom (India, Germany) by Upamanyu Bhattacharyya (animation)
I’ll Forget Your Name (France, Switzerland) by Yann Gonzalez
Love Story with a Dancing Man (Italy, Chile) by Cosimo Gomez
Magnetized (Argentina) by Luis Ortega
May You Outlive Us (Belgium, Lebanon, France) by Isabelle Mecattaf
Maya Butterfly (Ireland, Luxembourg) by Edwina Casey
My Way (Argentina, Italy) by Diego Lerman
People Still Die of Love (Chile, Mexico) by Fernando Guzzoni
Save our Souls (Germany, France) by Jonas Steinacker
Serafima (Estonia, Latvia) by Veiko Õunpuu
Sound of Silence (France, Greece, UK, Lebanon) by Joyce A. Nashawati
Tarfaya (Morocco, France) by Sofia Alaoui
The Black Pearl (Morocco) by Ayoub Qanir
The Outside (Spain) by Víctor Moreno
To Die on Your Feet (Chile, Spain, Luxembourg, Uruguay) by María Paz González
Torn Heart (Brazil, Portugal, Germany) by Helvécio Marins
Wild Horse in the Rotten West (UK, Bulgaria, France) by Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova
Wild Wild East (Poland, Israel) by Jan Holoubek
3 projects, that have been developed during the first workshop of Biennale College Cinema, 13th edition, and that have reached different stages of development and pre-production.
Orange Peel (Italy) by Anita Rivaroli
Saving the Day (France, Turkey) by Serhat Karaaslan
Summer 1999 (Vietnam) by Hang Luong Nguyen