Gondola traffic turned out to be minestrone thick as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film, Bardo, made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 1. Anticipation for the upcoming Netflix film was especially high considering that the filmmaker’s previous two movies, 2015’s The Revenant and 2014’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), both earned him best director statuettes at the Academy Awards. 

For Bardo — the film’s full title is actually Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths — Iñárritu returned to his native Mexico to tell the story of a famous journalist and documentarian (played by Daniel Gimenez Cacho) in the midst of an existential crisis. The film also stars Ximena Lamadrid and Íker Sánchez Solano, who were both in attendance and whom you can check out in our red carpet photo gallery. Bardo is one of three Netflix titles in competition for Venice’s Golden Lion, along with Noah Baumbach’s White Noise (which debuted the previous evening) and Andrew Dominik’s Blonde.