"In the days when the war began," wrote the Iranian director Ali Asgari, his eyes moving between the camera’s viewfinder and the news of incoming bombardments. It was from this suspended, anxious space that A Little Light emerged—a film shot clandestinely in Tehran and completed later in Turkey after conflict halted production. The work, selected for the main competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, tells of a doctor who, after his clinic is shuttered, decides to end his life but wavers during a final day with his family. Asgari’s words, shared on social media as the lineup was announced this week, captured the mood of a festival that leans hard into the real.

Alongside Asgari’s underground production, Venice’s Orizzonti section will host The Caretaker by Mohsen Qaraei, another unofficial Iranian film made without state permits and, like A Little Light, featuring unveiled actresses. Observers in Tehran note that since the nationwide protests of 2022, the presence of officially sanctioned Iranian cinema at major festivals has dwindled; instead, it is this wave of clandestine filmmaking—often shot with minimal crews and critiquing current social conditions—that now represents the country on the international stage. For actress Forouzan Jamshidnejad, a Norwegian-based Iranian who appears in A Little Light, the film became a collective processing of pain: a project born amid “real worries, suffering, and joys” of ordinary Iranians.

Yet for all the weight carried by these narratives of despair and resilience, the Venice programme also signals a reawakening of Italian cinema. Nanni Moretti returns to competition for the first time since 1989 with Succederà questa notte, an intimate love story that artistic director Alberto Barbera describes as “unexpected” and deliberately apolitical. Italian commentators have noted a broader resurgence: five Italian features in the main competition—including Marco Bechis’s return to the Argentine dictatorship-era traumas of Garage Olimpo, and Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, realised from Bernardo Bertolucci’s final, largely autobiographical screenplay. After a spring in which Italian films were notably absent from Berlin and Cannes, the lineup has been greeted in Rome as a corrective.

The festival’s tilt toward reality is further underscored by a remarkable documentary lineup—26 features, among them Luca Guadagnino’s seven-hour portrait of Bertolucci, a nearly four-hour Elon Musk investigation, and Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger, which promises to bring the Gallagher brothers to the Lido. In a departure from recent years, only one series has been selected: Peccato, by Emanuela Fanelli. Barbera explained that the festival received few convincing author-driven series; instead, the curatorial energy went to documentaries and to idiosyncratic fiction. Hollywood studios are almost entirely absent, with Disney the lone major present.

What emerges is a festival less of glamour and more of bearing witness. Asgari’s A Little Light borrows its title and existential spirit from Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, transposing the question of whether to live onto a Tehran suspended between peace and bombardment. In one scene, the doctor travels across the city, sharing his decision with his brother and sister; each reacts differently, and they must decide how to tell their mother. It is a moment of quiet fracture that echoes through the entire selection. When the festival opens on 2 September, the oldest in the world will offer not an escape, but a mirror held up to a world grappling with its own fragility—and perhaps, as the title suggests, a sliver of light.