Call Me By Your Name and Challengers director Luca Guadagnino is set to receive the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival (September 2nd – 12th, 2026).
The award is bestowed on “a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry.”
The award ceremony will take place on Tuesday September 8thin the Sala Casinò (Palazzo del Casinò), at 3.00 pm, before the screening Out of Competition of his epic Bernardo Bertolucci documentary, Joie de vivre (Italy, 435′).
Guadagnino said: “It might seem like a rhetorical gesture to say I am honored to receive the Glory to the Filmmaker award, but it is the plain truth for many reasons. To be honored for one’s craft or life as a filmmaker is an ambition that no one who makes films could ever presume to imagine achieving—especially by joining a group of filmmakers who have received this prestigious honor before me and to whom I owe so much of my development. So, I want to emphasize once again what an honor it is to receive this award, especially from Alberto Barbera and La Biennale di Venezia. Thank you, thank you!”
Director of the Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera stated: “The Glory to the Filmmaker Award celebrates in Luca Guadagnino an author who has managed to transform his curiosity into a form of creative freedom. Defying alignment with any single school or movement, he has established himself as a global director, capable of working with leading international actors and producers. He has navigated diverse genres—from melodrama to horror, coming-of-age to psychological thriller—while maintaining a consistent and recognizable voice, without ever losing a deeply Italian identity in portraying bodies, settings, and history. His is a vital cinema that does not shy away from risk: nomadic, sensual, sophisticated yet widely accessible, where intellectual provocation and emotion, memory and modernity coexist brilliantly. Glory to the Filmmaker honors the originality of a vision that has succeeded in renewing the language of contemporary cinema, celebrating a career that has brought Italian auteurship into a true dialogue with the entire world.”
Guadagnino has debuted a number of films on the Lido, including most recently After the Hunt (2025), Queer (2024) and Bones and All (2022). Previous films at the festival comprise The Protagonists (1999), Io sono l’amore (2009), Bertolucci on Bertolucci (2013), A Bigger Splash (2015), Suspiria (2018), Salvatore: The Shoemaker of Dreams (2020).
