Columbia Alumni and Faculty Well Represented in The 2026 Venice Film Festival

Several Columbia graduates and current faculty members are appearing in this year’s lineup at the Venice Film Festival (Biennale Cinema), which opened September 2 and runs through September 12. Columbia-affiliated projects will screen in multiple categories of the festival and include the following: Wild Horse Nine, produced by Cristián Donoso '17 screening in the Venezia 83 Competition; Flesh Impact directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal (CC '99) as part of the Venice Open, Out of Competition Short Film category; Quelques Instants De Bonheur (A Few Moments Of Happiness) by Barnard alum Shaden Safieddine Tazi (BC '22) and Man Made Lake directed by Annie Ning '25 in the Orizzonti Short Films Competition; and Ulrica produced by Joyce Yueyi Xing ‘21, screening in the Venice Immersive category. Last is Gu Chi directed by MFA Film student Amie Song, produced by Joyce Yueyi Xing '21 and executive produced by Professor Anocha Suwichakornpong '06 as part of the Venice College Cinema category.

Wild Horse Nine is the newest film by British-Irish playwright and director Marin McDonaugh, known for films like Gold Globe-winning The Banshees of Inisherin, and Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. Wild Horse Nine—whose cast features John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, and Parker Posey—takes place before the 1973 Chilean coup and follows two CIA agents (Chris and Lee) who are dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island. Among the island’s ancient statues, the two men wrestle with their relationship and turbulent past. When Chris befriends some rebellious students, the entire trip to the island is potentially threatened and compromised. Donoso acted as an Executive Producer of the film, as part of a production team that included Blueprint Pictures, Searchlight Pictures, in association with Film4. The Venezia 83 Competition is the main competition of the Venice film festival and includes 21 world premiere feature films.

Commemorating the centennial of Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday, Flesh Impact is a short film about Monroe—portrayed by Dakota Johnson—at both the height of her fame and, through a performance by the legendary Ellen Burstyn, as the old women she never got to be. Gyllenhaal was asked to take on this project, and though she knew very little about Monroe prior to the project, she used the film as an opportunity to research Monroe and her career deeply. The film is ultimately a meditation on Monroe on and off stage and the effect both poles of her life had on the other, particularly looking at her relationship with the legendary actor-trainer Konstantin Stainslavsky. The title of the film relates to a comment once used to express Monroe’s aura, “that she looked so real and luminous on camera that viewers felt they could touch her through the screen,” according to the film’s published synopsis. The film’s cast also includes Peter Sarsgaard and Sepideh Moafi. The Venice Open-Out of Competition is the category for established filmmakers creating outside of traditional formats, or creating short-form work.

The Orizzonti competition is dedicated to films that represent the latest aesthetic and artistic trends in filmmaking, mostly the work of early career directors and indie filmmakers. Quelques Instants De Bonheur (A Few Moments Of Happiness) is a documentary short detailing the experience of a young Lebanese filmmaker who has fled Beirut for Paris. Watching the daily bombings of Lebanon by Israel, filmmaker Safieddine Tazi found herself in a state of paralysis. In response to her emotional state, Tazi began to record her daily phone conversations with her father. Told through screen recordings, family voiceovers, and silence, the film portrays the experience of witnessing destruction remotely.

In Man Mad Lake, a young girl named Nita, living in a gated community in China, gets bitten by a creature in a nearby lake. The bite leads Nita’s mother, a French woman named Marie, to figure out what’s lurking in the lake’s waters, leading to a host of cultural clashes throughout the community. Based on director Ning’s own experience of moving into a gated community in China after living in America, “Man Made Lake explores the chasm between expectation and reality, personal and cultural values, and the difficulty of fully understanding each other across these divides.” Former Columbia film student David Pablos served as a judge for the Orizzonti competition.

Venice Immersive is the section of the festival dedicated entirely to immersive media, and all forms of XR expression. In Ulrica, a wartime submariner escapes his sinking submarine descending into the ocean. The experience is accompanied by a low-frequency sound he associated with the enemy craft called Ulrica. Hiding amongst the ocean’s caves and ruins, time begins to fracture causing memories and objects to blend and bleed into each other. “The sea becomes a liminal archive, transforming a soldier’s flight into an encounter with the forgotten and the unknowable,” reads the project’s online description. In the creators’ statement, director Hongbo Cai writes the following: “Water embodies a profoundly ambivalent force for me—maternal and abyssal, purifying and destabilizing. Precisely because it holds these contradictions simultaneously, it becomes a multidimensional model: a means of simulating altered states of consciousness, a framework for sensory inquiry, and a medium through which trauma healing and meditation can be imagined. Ulrica is conceived to bring this conscious, sensorial, and spiritual 'threshold-crossing' onto shore into a theatrical environment.”

Gu Shi, which translates to “story” or “tale” in English, is part of the Biennale College Cinema, the category of the festival dedicated to micro-budget works with producing—like Xing and Suwichakornpong—and directing teams from around the world. In the film, a family of four—parents and a daughter and son—arrive at a home in between the ocean and forest in the midst of an unnamed crisis. While temporary at first, the stay stretches into a protracted limbo especially when the son has an accident leaving him bedridden. To help abate his illness, the family turns towards ritual storytelling about the ocean, but these attempts at recovery seem to lead to periods of memory loss leading the daughter to question what of her childhood has been forgotten. As the past becomes porous and the present surroundings more and more threatening, the family must choose how to remember.

See a full lineup of films screening at the 2026 Venice Biennale Cinema here.