“Ink” by Danny Boyle opens the Venice Film Festival

Venice – 16 July 2026: The 83rd Venice Film Festival will begin with a film about the power of a catchy title. Danny Boyle’s “Ink” will open the festival on Wednesday, 2 September 2026, in the main hall of the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido. The film will have its world premiere there and will also compete for the Golden Lion. The festival will continue until 12 September.

Boyle, who has shaped a distinctive nervous and physical visual language with films such as “Trainspotting” and “Slumdog Millionaire”, this time turns to a chapter in British media history. At the centre of the story is Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 acquisition of the daily newspaper “The Sun”. Under his leadership, the paper was to become a tabloid whose tone, circulation and political influence would leave a lasting mark on the United Kingdom for decades.

The screenplay was written by James Graham, based on his play of the same name. Graham is regarded in the United Kingdom as one of the most precise observers of political and social life; his plays and series often revolve around institutions, election campaigns and the fractures hidden behind official façades. “Ink” does not simply tell the story of a media entrepreneur’s rise, but of the birth of a new editorial machine: fast, loud, popular and far from without consequences.

Guy Pearce takes on the role of Murdoch. Jack O’Connell portrays Larry Lamb, the editor-in-chief with whom Murdoch steered the newspaper in a radical new direction. Claire Foy is also part of the cast. It is precisely this constellation that makes the adaptation interesting: the subject concerns men who shape public opinion, but its real question is about the price of a public sphere that makes attention its hardest currency.

The stage version of “Ink” premiered in London in 2017, before being staged on Broadway. The play received several Tony Awards there and was especially noted for its breakneck dramaturgy. Boyle now has the opportunity to turn the confined spaces of newsrooms, printing plants and power negotiations into cinema. That a film about press barons opens a major festival has a subtle, almost old-fashioned irony to it.

The artistic direction of the Venice Film Festival is once again in the hands of Alberto Barbera. By choosing “Ink”, the festival sets the tone early for a programme that does not treat media history as a distant archival subject. Murdoch’s “Sun” emerged long before social networks and the digital outrage economy. That is precisely why Boyle’s film should resonate with the present: as the story of how information becomes spectacle—and how spectacle finds its way back into politics.