Venice honors Luca Guadagnino with filmmaker award as his seven-hour Bertolucci tribute premieres

Luca Guadagnino stood in the Sala Casinò at the Palazzo del Casinò on the Venice Lido on Tuesday afternoon to accept the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award, the honorary prize the Venice International Film Festival has given each year since 2006 to a director judged to have made a distinctive mark on contemporary cinema. The ceremony, held at 3 p.m. local time, preceded the out-of-competition premiere of Guadagnino's own new film: a 435-minute documentary about the late Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, titled Joie de Vivre.

The award and the screening arrived on the same afternoon by design. Rather than deliver a lifetime-achievement statuette for past work, the 83rd Venice International Film Festival paired the honor with a new film Guadagnino made specifically for this festival — one that is itself an act of tribute to another filmmaker.

What happened

According to the festival's own announcement, the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award was presented to Guadagnino "before the screening Out of Competition of his new documentary, Joie de vivre." Festival director Alberto Barbera said the prize "celebrates in Luca Guadagnino an author who has managed to transform his curiosity into a form of creative freedom," pointing to a filmography that moves between genres — from the coming-of-age drama Call Me by Your Name to the horror remake Suspiria to the cannibal road movie Bones and All — while retaining what Barbera described as a recognizably Italian sensibility.

Guadagnino, 55, is the 21st recipient of the award since its founding at the 2006 festival, when it was created to honor Japanese director Takeshi Kitano and named after his film Glory to the Filmmaker! Jaeger-LeCoultre sponsored the prize for its first fifteen years; Cartier has backed it since 2021. Recent recipients include Julian Schnabel in 2025, Claude Lelouch in 2024, Wes Anderson in 2023 and Ridley Scott in 2021.

"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. 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." — Luca Guadagnino

The numbers

Joie de Vivre, Guadagnino's full title for which runs to Notes, thoughts, words, reflections, faces, and visions concerning Bernardo Bertolucci and the cinephilia of the 20th century that no longer exists, clocks in at 435 minutes — just over seven hours. Venice is showing it as a director's cut split into two parts, with the first installment screening Tuesday alongside the award ceremony and the second following on Wednesday, September 9, according to the festival's own program listing, which shows additional screenings running through September 10 at the Astra and Sala Casinò venues.

The film is produced by the Italian company MeMo Films, co-founded by Gabriele Moratti and Francesco Melzi d'Eril, and was shot on a mix of digital and 35mm cameras by cinematographers Simone D'Arcangelo and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the latter a longtime Guadagnino collaborator. The sales agent HanWay Films has taken on international distribution rights ahead of the premiere. The documentary's cast of interview subjects is unusually large for the format: it includes directors Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg, Alfonso Cuarón and James Gray; actors Margot Robbie and Debra Winger; Bertolucci's longtime producer Jeremy Thomas; and critics including Armond White and Mark Cousins.

How we got here

Bernardo Bertolucci died in Rome in November 2018 at 77. He remains the only Italian director to have won the Academy Award for best director, an honor he received in 1988 for The Last Emperor, which swept all nine Oscars for which it was nominated, including best picture. His earlier film Last Tango in Paris (1972) made him a figure of international controversy as well as acclaim, and his catalog — The Conformist, 1900, The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha — is built around recurring preoccupations with political upheaval, sexuality and the individual's place inside history. Venice itself gave Bertolucci a lifetime achievement Golden Lion in 2007.

Guadagnino, born in Palermo in 1971, has described the documentary as arising out of a personal debt to Bertolucci's work rather than a commissioned retrospective. The film opens from Guadagnino's own vantage point before widening into conversation with the directors, actors and critics Bertolucci influenced — an approach that several outlets covering early screenings described as closer to an essay film than a conventional biographical documentary. Guadagnino's own Venice history includes four previous films in competition for the Golden Lion, most recently 2024's Queer, and the 2022 film Bones and All, which won him the festival's Silver Lion for best director.

Reaction

Barbera, who has led Venice's selection process since 2012, has spoken about the documentary separately from the award citation, describing it in comments reported by the Italian trade press as a film that keeps viewers "glued to the screen" despite its length — a claim tested directly on the Lido this week, where the two-part structure requires audiences to return on consecutive days to see the whole work. Early trade reviews out of Venice have generally treated the runtime as the story's central fact, with critics debating whether the film's essayistic, digressive shape earns its seven hours or simply requires it, given the scope of a career spanning five decades and roughly a dozen features.

The pairing of the award with the premiere also drew attention because it departs from the format Venice has used with past Glory to the Filmmaker honorees, several of whom, as TheWrap noted in reporting on the award, presented new narrative features rather than documentaries about other directors. Coverage of the festival's broader 2026 edition, including the competition lineup announced by the Hollywood Reporter, has noted that this year's Venice slate is unusually dense with awards-adjacent activity: alongside Guadagnino's honor, the festival separately gave Golden Lions for lifetime achievement to George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn.

What happens next

The second half of Joie de Vivre screens Wednesday, with further public showings through September 10. HanWay Films is expected to use the Venice premiere to advance sales conversations with distributors for the documentary's eventual release beyond the festival circuit, though as of Tuesday no distribution deal outside festival exhibition had been publicly announced. The main Venice competition continues under jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal, with the Golden Lion and other juried prizes to be announced at a closing ceremony on September 12, when the festival will also screen Giovanni Veronesi's Dio ride (God Laughs) as its closing film.

For Guadagnino, the award adds a Venice honor to a resume already built on multiple competition selections and a Silver Lion for best director. His next narrative feature, Artificial — a drama centered on OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield — will skip the festival circuit that made his reputation; Amazon dropped the film as its distributor earlier this year, and Neon has since picked it up for a world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5, ahead of a limited theatrical release around Christmas.