Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino said his latest film La Grazia is about “love, doubt and politics”. It will open the 82nd Venice Film Festival on Wednesday night.
The director of The Great Beauty, Il Divo and Youth told reporters the film explores different forms of love. “Not just immediate love, which concerns history, but also love in the broader sense for a wife, a daughter, and also for institutions, for the law, and even love for a way of engaging in politics that is unfortunately increasingly out of date, one that was tied to the exercise of doubt and responsibility,” he said.
The film, which drew strong applause at its morning press screening, stars Toni Servillo as Mariano De Santis, a fictional President of the Republic. A widower and Catholic, he lives in the Quirinale Palace with his daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti). As his mandate nears its end, he faces two sensitive requests for pardons, both linked to euthanasia, while still haunted by the death of his wife eight years earlier.
Sorrentino underlined the role of uncertainty in politics. “The exercise of doubt is one of the qualities rarely seen in politics. On issues like granting a pardon to a murderer or signing a law on euthanasia, the exercise of doubt should be a conditio sine qua non. Today we too often witness men of power exercising certainties. Only once those certainties were supported by ideologies. Today they are mostly bizarre.”
La Grazia will be released in Italian cinemas on January 15, 2026 by PiperFilm.
Festival will not bar artists
82nd Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera also addressed calls by activist group Venice4Gaza to bar artists accused of “supporting genocide” in Gaza. The group’s campaign led to the withdrawal of Israeli actress Gal Gadot and Scottish actor Gerard Butler.
“Our position is that, on the one hand, we are the leading Italian cultural institution, a place of openness, discussion, and debate, which does not exercise any form of censorship against anyone,” Barbera said. “For this reason, we reject the request to exclude artists if they intend to attend the Film Festival. And on the other hand, we have never hesitated to clearly express and declare our enormous suffering in the face of what is happening in Gaza and Palestine.”
The festival opened with La Grazia and the awarding of a career Golden Lion to German filmmaker Werner Herzog. The main competition jury is chaired by Sideways director Alexander Payne.
