Venice has programmed a film of two hundred and ten minutes

There is a quiet confidence in putting a film of three and a half hours in front of an audience and simply trusting them to stay. Venice has done it, and rather than apologise for it, has said so in advance.

The long one

Of the twenty titles announced for competition on 23 July, the longest is Dau, by Ilya Khrzhanovsky, at 210 minutes. Artistic director Alberto Barbera has said that this year’s selection runs long generally — which is a courteous way of telling people to look at the running times before they book two things in an evening.

The festival around it

The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs from 2 to 12 September 2026 on the Lido. The jury is chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It opens with Ink, by Danny Boyle, with Guy Pearce, and closes with Giovanni Veronesi’s God Laughs. Honorary Golden Lions go to Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney. Also in competition: Werner Herzog, Martin McDonagh, Hirokazu Koreeda, Lee Chang-dong, Nanni Moretti, Florian Zeller and Shinya Tsukamoto.

Why length is a decision and not an accident

A long film is expensive to show. It occupies a screen that could have held two shorter ones, it thins out the number of times it can play in a day, and it asks something of an audience that no marketing department has ever found a way to make sound appealing.

A festival is the one place where that arithmetic can be set aside, because nobody is counting the day’s takings against the seat. Which is why the very long film tends to have its life at festivals and then a rather harder time afterwards — and why a running time of 210 minutes in a competition line-up is worth noticing. Somebody looked at it and decided it was worth the screen.

The civilised way to do it

One is not obliged to treat a long film as an endurance test. Eat beforehand rather than during, sit further back than instinct suggests, and take the interval — if there is one — as intended rather than as a chance to check a telephone. The pleasure of a very long film is that it stops being a thing one is watching and becomes, for an afternoon, simply where one is.