Venice 2026's non-fiction slate is stacked with films that run four, five, seven hours — and every one of them sits out of competition, which is the part worth reading.
The eye goes straight to the hours. When the 83rd Venice Film Festival opens on 2 September, its out-of-competition non-fiction section will carry a run of films that don't so much screen as commit you to an afternoon: Mariano Llinás's 330-minute *Biografía de Jorge Luis Borges*, Luca Guadagnino's roughly seven-hour Bernardo Bertolucci portrait *Joie de Vivre*, Alex Gibney's four-hour *Musk*, Julia Loktev's 355-minute *My Undesirable Friends: Part II*. Marathon documentary as house style. But the runtime is the easy story. The tell is the section.
The marathon gets a stage, not a ballot
None of these are competition titles. Venice has taken its longest, most demanding work and placed it precisely where the jury never has to weigh it. The logic is quiet but firm: a two-hour drama and a five-and-a-half-hour biography cannot sit on the same scale, because the awards architecture assumes a runtime — a unit of comparison a Golden Lion ballot silently enforces. So the festival banks the cinephile prestige of the marathon (the seriousness, the event, the endurance credential worn like a badge on the way out of the Sala Grande) while keeping the films clear of the one room where their form would break the arithmetic.
Llinás is the sharpest case. The Argentine — a founder of the El Pampero Cine collective, whose *La Flor* famously ran past thirteen hours — has built an entire practice out of duration as form rather than indulgence, out of the conviction that some subjects only surrender at length. His Borges arrives already sold internationally and already routed onward to Toronto. A festival that genuinely believed the long film was a formal choice would have to judge it as one.
Venice will happily seat a five-and-a-half-hour film in its programme. It just won't let one anywhere near the prize.
The real life of these films is elsewhere anyway — Toronto next, then the cinephile circuit, then the eventual streaming drop where a pause button quietly rewrites the "marathon" back into episodes nobody has to endure in one sitting. Which is the honest question the slate raises: is the long film a work to be judged whole, or an occasion — a flex of programming seriousness that flatters the festival and the ticket-holder in equal measure? None of this makes out-of-competition a demotion; it is often the freest room on the Lido, unburdened by the horse-race. But don't mistake a lineup thick with runtime for a festival that has decided what the long film is worth. The marathon is on the marquee. The verdict stays reserved for something two hours long.