Luca Guadagnino will be feted at the upcoming Venice Film Festival.
He'll be honoured with the Cartier Glory To The Filmmaker Award.
The Italian director is a recurring face at the festival.
Venice Film Festival 2026 will bestow the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award upon Luca Guadagnino. The Italian filmmaker is also returning to the festival with his 11th selection. Guadagnino will present 435-minute Bertolucci documentary Joie De Vivre at the festival. Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera said the award recognizes a filmmaker “who has managed to transform his curiosity into a form of creative freedom.”
He has had four films compete for the Golden Lion, the last one being Queer (2024). Bones and All (2022) fetched him the the Silver Lion for Best Director. Guadagnino’s latest narrative feature, Artificial, will skip the fest. The film, starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, was originally set up at Amazon MGM Studios but was dropped shortly after Amazon announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI. Neon subsequently acquired worldwide rights. The company has chosen to skip the fall festival route and directly launch an awards campaign.
Guadagnino did present his last film, After the Hunt, starring Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield, at last year’s edition of the film festival.
“It might seem like a rhetorical gesture to say I am honored to receive the Glory to the Filmmaker award, but it is the plain truth for many reasons,” Guadagnino said. “To be honored for one’s craft or life as a filmmaker is an ambition that no one who makes films could ever presume to imagine achieving—especially by joining a group of filmmakers who have received this prestigious honor before me and to whom I owe so much of my development. So, I want to emphasize once again what an honor it is to receive this award, especially from Alberto Barbera and La Biennale di Venezia. Thank you, thank you!”
Venice Fest Artistic Director On Luca Guadagnino
Welcoming this announcement, the Director of the Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera has stated: “The Glory to the Filmmaker Award celebrates in Luca Guadagnino an author who has managed to transform his curiosity into a form of creative freedom. Defying alignment with any single school or movement, he has established himself as a global director, capable of working with leading international actors and producers. He has navigated diverse genres—from melodrama to horror, coming-of-age to psychological thriller—while maintaining a consistent and recognizable voice, without ever losing a deeply Italian identity in portraying bodies, settings, and history. His is a vital cinema that does not shy away from risk: nomadic, sensual, sophisticated yet widely accessible, where intellectual provocation and emotion, memory and modernity coexist brilliantly. Glory to the Filmmaker honors the originality of a vision that has succeeded in renewing the language of contemporary cinema, celebrating a career that has brought Italian auteurship into a true dialogue with the entire world.”
The Venice Film Festival 2026 runs September 2-12.
