Empire creator Lee Daniels, Capernaum director Nadine Labaki, and avant-garde artist Marina Abramovic will be honored at this year’s Venice Film Festival with the 2026 Liberatum Pioneer Awards. The awards, presented by Pablo Ganguli’s Liberatum cultural diplomacy organization, recognize artists whose work “has challenged convention, broken down systemic barriers, expanded artistic boundaries, redefined the possibilities of their respective fields and promoted the importance of preserving human dignity.” The awards presentations will take place in Venice on Sept 6 and 7 as part of the inaugural Liberatum Art & Cinema, a new multidisciplinary programme staged to mark the cultural group’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Announcing this year’s winners on Wednesday, Liberatum said it was recognizing Daniels, director for the “bold, uncompromising filmmaking that has consistently brought subjects largely absent from mainstream American film and television into major public view, including Precious, The Butler and Empire.” Daniels’ focus on the depiction of “Black life, trauma, sexuality and family with candour, at scale and without dilution,” the group said, “has opened space within the industry for narratives previously considered commercially …