Venice's Golden Lion comes down to a Gaza documentary and a comedy

The 83rd Venice Film Festival closes tonight, and the Golden Lion looks like a straight fight between two films nobody wanted to follow on the Lido.

NAZA, the Gaza documentary from No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, drew a 24.5-minute standing ovation at its premiere on 10 September, the longest recorded at the festival, Variety reported. Executive producer Jonathan Glazer led the applause. Some of the audience held Palestinian flags.

The record it broke was a year old, and it belongs to someone in the room tonight. Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab ran to 22 minutes in 2025. Ben Hania is on this year's jury.

The two films in front

NAZA is built on anonymised testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders, and it is the only documentary in the 21-film competition. It was added to the line-up on 24 August, weeks after the rest. A win would not be unprecedented: Gianfranco Rosi's Sacro GRA took the Golden Lion in 2013.

Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine had the festival's first rapturous reception, a 13-minute ovation that left John Malkovich fighting back tears, per Variety. The film follows two CIA agents on Easter Island shortly before the 1973 coup in Chile, with Malkovich opposite Sam Rockwell.

This is McDonagh's third competition film in a row at Venice. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri left with the screenplay prize in 2017. The Banshees of Inisherin took screenplay and the Volpi Cup for Colin Farrell in 2022. A jury that likes him has somewhere obvious to put him again, which is not the same as giving him the Lion.

The one the critics preferred

Neither film has the best reviews of the festival. That is Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, which premiered to near-uniform praise and an ovation cut short only because staff had to clear the room for the next screening, the Korea Herald reported.

Ovations are a poor guide to juries. They measure who is in the room and how they feel at midnight. A jury argues for two days in a hotel and hands the prize to the film it can defend over breakfast.

The jury, and the row it opened with

Maggie Gyllenhaal chairs a jury of Ben Hania, composer Daniel Blumberg, academic Francesco Casetti, director Xavier Giannoli, director Shahrbanoo Sadat and Johnnie To. Gyllenhaal opened the festival by asking publicly why only two of the 21 competition films had a woman directing, a question the festival's artistic director answered with an argument about quality, as we reported.

Both of those films are still in the race. May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown has admirers, and Szor co-directed NAZA.

The winners are announced at 19:00 Rome time in the Sala Grande, and the closing film screens after.