CHINA Edition
Hungarian Edition
Hungary’s presence at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival cannot be reduced to a single film, section or production model. Across the official programme and the independently organised Giornate degli Autori, four Hungarian-linked projects will arrive on the Lido: features directed by Lili Horvát, Gábor Reisz and Kornél Mundruczó, alongside Lydia Cornett’s Hungarian–British–American short Test Track.
Together, they present a varied picture of contemporary Hungarian filmmaking: a major European co-production led by a Hungarian director and creative team; an independently financed Hungarian–Italian feature; an international, English-language production built around a Hungarian filmmaker; and a competition short that turns a particular landscape in western Hungary into its central subject.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival will take place from September 2 to 12, 2026.
Venice Days Opener: Lili Horvát’s My Notes on Mars
The most prominent Hungarian premiere outside the festival’s official selection belongs to Lili Horvát. Her first English-language feature, My Notes on Mars, will open the competition programme of Giornate degli Autori, commonly known as Venice Days.
Mackenzie Davis and Rupert Friend star as Margot and Sam, a married couple whose life is upended when Margot, an American space scientist, disappears during a hike in the Alps. She resurfaces weeks later at her own memorial service, with no memory of her past beyond a set of research notes connected to Mars.
The romantic drama continues Horvát’s exploration of intimacy, perception and emotional uncertainty while moving into a considerably broader international production environment. Made with Austrian, French, German, Bosnian, Montenegrin and American partners, the film nevertheless retains substantial Hungarian authorship behind the camera. Key department heads include cinematographer Róbert Maly, production designer Sandra Sztevanovity, editor Károly Szalai, costume designer Juli Szlávik and composer Gábor Keresztes, with Dóra Csernátony and Horvát serving as lead producers.
Partially shot on 35mm, the film completed its processing and grading at the NFI Film Lab. This makes My Notes on Mars not only a Hungarian-directed international feature, but also an example of how the country’s creative and technical infrastructure can remain involved as a project expands beyond its original market.
According to the National Film Institute, the film has already secured distribution in several international territories and will reach Hungarian cinemas this winter through Mozinet. Horvát previously presented Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time at Venice Days in 2020; her return as the section’s opening filmmaker marks both artistic continuity and a significant step outward.
Venezia Spotlight: Gábor Reisz’s Ground Floor
Gábor Reisz returns with his fourth feature, Ground Floor (Földszint), which will have its world premiere in the official Venezia Spotlight section.
Described by festival director Alberto Barbera as a grotesque comedy, the film centres on Kristóf Méhn, played by Ádám Tompa, a former painter now working as a bank archivist. On the same day that he learns he is going to become a father, Kristóf discovers mould spreading across the wall of his ground-floor apartment. His attempt to locate its source draws him into the affairs of the building and a growing suspicion that the decay is not confined to a single flat.
Filmhu reported that Barbera suggested the diseased apartment block could also be read as an allegory of the Orbán system. The interpretation gives the film an explicitly contemporary dimension, although its precise tone and conclusions will only become clear at the premiere.
Co-written by Reisz and Éva Schulze, Ground Floor is a Hungarian–Italian co-production led by Juli Berkes of Proton Cinema, with Italian producer Andrea Romeo also joining the project. Crowdfunding supplemented its budget, continuing the independent production strategy that has characterised Reisz’s recent work. Cirko Film will release it in Hungarian cinemas on October 1.
The selection also extends Reisz’s close relationship with Venice. Explanation for Everything won the main award in the Orizzonti section in 2023, before the director returned to the festival as a jury member the following year.
Out of Competition: Kornél Mundruczó’s Place to Be
Kornél Mundruczó represents another form of Hungarian presence: that of a director operating within a fully international, star-driven production.
His new feature, Place to Be, will screen in Venice’s Open – Out of Competition programme. Written by Mundruczó’s long-standing collaborator Kata Wéber, the film stars Ellen Burstyn and Taika Waititi as an elderly woman and a middle-aged man who form an unlikely friendship while travelling from Chicago to New York to return a lost racing pigeon.
Pamela Anderson, Murray Bartlett, David Wenham, Édgar Ramírez, Lena Waithe and Maika Monroe also appear in the wider ensemble. The Venice premiere carries additional significance as the festival will present Ellen Burstyn with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Although Venice catalogues Place to Be as an Australian production, its creative centre remains closely connected to the Hungarian filmmaking partnership between Mundruczó and Wéber. It demonstrates how Hungarian authorship can operate within major international projects without requiring the resulting film to present itself primarily through nationality.
Orizzonti Short Competition: Lydia Cornett’s Test Track
The fourth route to Venice is smaller in scale, yet particularly rooted in place. Lydia Cornett’s 15-minute Test Track (Tesztpálya) was selected for the Orizzonti Short Films International Competition, a field of 13 titles chosen from approximately 2,500 submissions.
The short follows 14-year-old Hunor and his family as they bring their greyhounds to ZalaZONE, an advanced autonomous-vehicle testing facility in western Hungary. Their task is to clear wildlife from the site before testing begins. The official festival description frames the encounter as one between inherited knowledge and an increasingly militarising technological future.
Cornett is an American documentary filmmaker who came to Hungary as a Fulbright scholar, while the production involved a predominantly Hungarian cast and crew. The result does not simply use Hungary as a backdrop: its subject emerges directly from the uneasy coexistence of local tradition, industrial development and changing ideas about the landscape.
A Presence Defined by Range
Taken together, these four selections offer a more revealing picture than a simple count of Hungarian titles in the catalogue. Hungary appears in Venice as a source of directors, screenwriters, producers, crews, laboratories, locations and stories—sometimes within nationally identifiable cinema, and sometimes as part of a much broader international structure.
Horvát moves into ambitious European co-production without abandoning a Hungarian creative base. Reisz continues an independent and socially observant form of domestic filmmaking. Mundruczó works with an international ensemble on a production whose identity extends well beyond national borders. Cornett, meanwhile, finds a distinctly cinematic subject in the meeting of rural practice and advanced technology in Zala County.
Rather than relying on a single flagship film, Hungary’s 2026 Venice presence is built through several credible routes into international cinema—and that breadth may be its most meaningful quality.
