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George Clooney, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Alexandre Desplat and more are set to take part in an inaugural forum themed around creativity in Venice next month, held alongside the film festival.
Presented by Finch & Partners
and CAA, the invitation-only forum is titled “The Future of… Creativity” and, according to a press release, aims to gather “leading voices from literature, cinema, the visual arts and technology to explore one of the defining questions of our time: what is the future of creativity in the age of transformational change?”
Taking place on Sept. 4 at the historic Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia, the forum will be hosted by Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera and will feature panel discussions with Clooney, who is set to receive the fest’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement; Gyllenhaal, who is also serving as Venice jury president; Oscar-winning composer and frequent Wes Anderson collaborator Desplat; legendary Italian writer-director Giuseppe Tornatore; Cardinal Jose Tolentino de Mendonca, who is the culture and education prefect at the Vatican; sculptor and painter Kennedy Yanko; visual artist Marc Quinn; president of Signal Meredith Whittaker; and Emmy-winning film and TV director Shannon Murphy (“Killing Eve”).
The forum builds on the inaugural “Future of… Film” event held during the Cannes Film Festival in May, which featured Darren Aronofsky, James Gray, Nadine Labaki, Whit Stillman and J.A. Bayona as well as executives from Mubi, A24, Sony Pictures Classics, Neon, Focus Features and Sony Pictures. The Venice edition is set to “broaden the conversation beyond film to examine how AI and other technological changes are transforming creativity across disciplines and what that means for the future of culture itself,” according to the release.
“Storytelling has accompanied every stage of human civilization, and the tools for telling stories have never stopped changing,” Barbera said in a statement. “Artificial intelligence may prove the greatest change yet, with an impact on human activity perhaps greater even than that of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. There is much discussion, quite rightly, about its worrying aspects: the repercussions for employment, for artists’ copyright and image rights and the ethical dimension of the phenomenon. I believe it is important, however, to begin with a different question: what does this mean for creativity itself, and what new tools, if any, might it offer to support the work of artists, and of filmmakers in particular. To this end, we have asked a select group of qualified artists to discuss the topic freely, expressing their views, in the hope that this might help to open a new chapter in the debate on the future of creativity and storytelling.”
Added Claire Ingle-Finch, managing partner at Finch & Partners: “Human beings have always told stories. It is how we make sense of ourselves, and how one generation speaks to the next. The stories are handed down through centuries and millennia; only the form changes. In 2026, the form is changing again, and artificial intelligence is that change. This year’s ‘The Future Of… Creativity’ brings together people who have given their lives to storytelling, to talk plainly about what this moment means for the craft and for the people who love it. It is a conversation, honestly had, among people who know the work from the inside. Venice, which has traded in stories for a thousand years, seemed the right place for it.”
Co-head of CAA Media Finance Roeg Sutherland said that the forums “convene those who shape culture and are dedicated to sustaining and protecting art — in all its forms, while embracing new forms of expression and innovation that celebrates the human experience.”
He continued, “As we saw at our event in Cannes, world-class business leaders, creators and visionaries from across industries share a collective interest in harnessing technology to deepen creativity, and this gathering in Venice expands on those meaningful and productive conversations.”
