Venice Giornate Degli Autori Names 2026 Winners — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- María Aparicio's third feature "Sadness Sometimes, Other Times Revolt" won the top GDA Director's Award, carrying a €20,000 ($23k) cash prize split between the director and the film's international distributor.
- Robert Guediguian's "A Woman Today" (Une Femme Aujourd'hui) — starring Marilou Aussilloux as a young woman whose outwardly successful life collapses after an attack by a colleague — won the Europa Cinemas Label for its portrait of contemporary womanhood's contradictions.
- Nicola Sorcinelli's "Balkan," about an Afghan conductor and his son who flee after music is banned and meet an Italian doctor, won the People's Choice Award with 76% of audience votes at the Sala Perla.
- The GDA Director's Award jury — Spain's Berlinale Golden Bear winner Carla Simón, Italian editor-director Sara Fgaier and Beirut's Metropolis cinema director Hania Mroué — praised the Aparicio film for portraying 'the solitude of the present' through a blend of fiction and documentary.
- Europa Cinemas Label jury members from cinemas in Italy (Cinema Teatro Giardino), Czech Republic (Atlas, Prague), Ireland (Light House, Dublin) and Sweden (Folkets Bio Umeå) selected Guediguian's film from the 10 competing in this year's Giornate degli Autori lineup.
- The Europa Cinemas Label award itself carries support for promotion and distribution of the winning title across the namesake European cinema network's member venues.
Why it matters: The €20,000 GDA prize is split directly between Aparicio and her international distributor, materially funding the Argentine film as it moves beyond Venice, while the Europa Cinemas Label slots Guediguian's film into promotional pipelines across the network's European member cinemas — both make a Venice sidebar prize worth real money rather than just prestige. The audience's 76% landslide for Sorcinelli's Afghan-refugee drama suggests displacement narratives are finding documented commercial pull with arthouse crowds right now.
Ask SkimNews
