Deadly Sweet (Col cuore in gola) pre-opens the 2026 Venice Film Festival

Deadly Sweet (Col cuore in gola, 1967) by Tinto Brass will be the pre-opening film of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. The screening will take place on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, in Sala Darsena on the Lido di Venezia, one day before the official opening of the festival, which runs September 2 through September 12 under the direction of Alberto Barbera.

The selection pays tribute to Tinto Brass, a filmmaker with deep Venetian roots and one of the most unconventional voices in Italian cinema. Deadly Sweet, directed and edited by Brass, is part of the Venice Classics programme and will be presented in the world premiere of its new 4K digital restoration.

A 4K restoration by the CSC with the support of Netflix

The CSC carried out the restoration at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, with the support of Netflix, using materials held by rights owner Compass Film. The project brings renewed attention to one of the key films in Brass’ experimental period, when pop art, comics, fractured editing and the stylised codes of the European thriller shaped his cinema.

Produced by Ermanno Donati and Luigi Carpentieri, Deadly Sweet was originally presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in 1967. The film is loosely inspired by Sergio Donati’s novel Il sepolcro di carta, with a screenplay by Tinto Brass, Francesco Longo and Pierre Lévy-Corti. The cast is led by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin, with cinematography by Silvano Ippoliti, production design by Carmelo Patrono and music by Armando Trovajoli.

London, pop art and comics in Brass’ cinema

Shot in London, Deadly Sweet belongs to Brass’ British period, which also includes Nerosubianco and Dropout. The English capital becomes both a physical setting and a mental landscape, crossed by graphic signs, erotic tension, urban violence and the visual culture of the 1960s.

For the film’s graphic concept, Brass worked with Guido Crepax, then one of the most distinctive figures in Italian comics. The director later recalled the collaboration in precise terms: “I even had Guido Crepax draw a whole series of illustrations for the action sequences, and they are quite rare because they are one of Crepax’s few works in colour, and in addition to being very beautiful, I used them as a storyboard”, said Tinto Brass.

Desire, projection and disillusionment

The synopsis in the original pressbook describes the film as the story of a brief, strange encounter between Bernard, a disappointed man, and Jane, a young woman without illusions. Their meeting takes place in front of a dead body. It unfolds over the course of one day and one night, while contemporary London presses on their relationship with its contradictions and fatality.

In statements given to AdnKronos in 1967, Brass described the protagonist as a man who falls in love with a woman even though he finds her beside a corpse: “He foregoes any attitude of caution, of expediency and dives headlong into this adventure that totally compromises him. The film is also the story of a disillusionment, given that the character imagines the woman for something she is not”.

A key work in 1960s Italian cinema

Born in Milan in 1933 into a Venetian family, Giovanni “Tinto” Brass studied law before moving to Paris in 1957. There, he worked around the Cinémathèque française, directed by Henri Langlois, entered the milieu of the emerging Nouvelle Vague, and became an assistant to Joris Ivens and Roberto Rossellini.

His iconoclastic feature debut, In capo al mondo, later retitled Chi lavora è perduto, was presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1963 and soon encountered censorship, the first in a long series of battles connected to his libertarian and anti-conformist vision. With Deadly Sweet, the Venice Film Festival now restores visibility to a work in which thriller, pop art and European visual culture meet at a decisive moment in the evolution of Italian cinema.