Venice Parallel Section Giornate Degli Autori Unveils 2026 Winners

Argentinian director María Aparicio’s third feature Sadness Sometimes, Other Times Revolt has scooped the top prize at the 2026 edition of Venice parallel section Giornate degli Autori, the GDA Director’s Award.

In other key prizes, French director Robert Guediguian’s A Woman Today (Une Femme Aujourd’hui) won the Europa Cinemas Label, while Italian director Nicola Sorcinelli’s Balkan scooped the People’s Choice Award.

They were among 10 films being showcased in competition this year in Giornate degli Autori, which is also often referred to under its former name of Venice Days.

The GDA Director’s Award comes with a €20,000 ($23k) cash prize to be split between the director and the international distributor of the film.

This year’s jury comprised Spain’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner Carla Simón (Alcarrás), Italian director and editor Sara Fgaier and Hania Mroué, director of Metropolis, the historic arthouse cinema in Beirut.

They praised the performances of Eva Bianco and Roger Koza as two Argentinians, a director and a historian living in Madrid, whose encounters are the heart of the film, saying the film had left them deeply moved.

“A film that portrays the solitude of the present, holding together an intimate dimension and a political charge, inviting us to think about labor, immigration and privilege through a delicate mise en scène built on small gestures rather than big events,” read their jury statement.

“The personal and the collective, fiction and documentary, history and present time merge into a single breath. We left the cinema deeply moved, by a sadness and a spirit of rebellion that do not oppose one another, but coexist, as two faces of the same disorientation.”

Veteran director Robert Guédiguian Europe Cinema Label winner A Woman Today, stars Marilou Aussilloux as a young woman who rethinks her life after her outwardly successful life falls apart when she is attacked by a colleague at a work event.

The Europa Cinema Label award, organized by the namesake European cinema network, comes with support for the promotion and distribution of the winning film within its members.  

The jury made up of representatives of independent cinemas from across Europe comprised Maria Gesuato (Cinema Teatro Giardino, San Giorgio delle Pertiche, Italy), Vít Janeček (Atlas Cinema, Prague, Czech Republic), Aisling Kane (Light House Cinema, Dublin, Ireland) and Daniel Tollefsen Altamirano (Folkets Bio Umeå, Umeå, Sweden).

The praised A Woman Today for its portrait of the contradictions of what it means to be a woman in contemporary society.

“With empathy but without simplification, Robert Guediguian captures the tensions between apparent freedom, success and persistent social expectations, between professional independence, sexuality, the desire for intimacy, and the need to live life on one’s own terms. The film is equally strong in its observation of society, as informed by the colonial past and in its portrayal of its protagonist’s inner world – her doubts, vulnerability, defiance, and search for a new direction in life.”

The People’s Choice Award, assigned on the basis of the votes submitted by audiences in the Sala Perla at the Palazzo del Casinò at the end of each Official Selection screening.

Sorcinelli’s winning drama revolves around the encounter between a conductor and his son who flee Afghanistan after music is banned and an Italian doctor that will spark life-changing choices. The Giornate degli Autori said the film had garnered 76% of the audience votes.