Venice, Ink and the Battle for the Stories We Believe

The 83rd Venice Film Festival opens with Danny Boyle’s Rupert Murdoch drama—and a timely debate about who gets to tell cinema’s biggest stories.

There are few places where cinema feels quite as theatrical as Venice.

Arriving by boat, stars cross the Venetian Lagoon towards the Lido, where the world’s oldest film festival has once again transformed a narrow island between the Adriatic Sea and Venice itself into the centre of the film world. On September 2, the 83rd Venice International Film Festival officially opened, beginning ten days of premieres, red carpets, political debate and the annual race for the coveted Golden Lion.

The festival opened in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema with the world premiere of Ink, the latest film from British director Danny Boyle, presented in competition.

It is an appropriately provocative choice.

Boyle—whose career includes Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire and the 28 Days Later universe—turns his attention to another form of modern cultural contagion: the tabloid press.

Ink explores the transformation of the British newspaper The Sun in 1969, when Rupert Murdoch acquired the struggling title and helped reshape it into a populist, sensationalist media phenomenon. Guy Pearce plays Murdoch, while Jack O’Connell takes on the role of editor Larry Lamb. Claire Foy also stars.

The screenplay was written by acclaimed playwright James Graham, adapting his own stage work. The story is less simply a portrait of Murdoch than an examination of a moment when news, entertainment, ambition and mass-market culture collided—and began changing the way information was sold to the public.

In that sense, Ink may be a period film, but its subject could hardly feel more contemporary.

The rise of clickbait, the transformation of journalism into spectacle and the extraordinary power of media owners may be twenty-first-century concerns, but Boyle’s film returns to one of the moments when the machinery behind modern attention culture began accelerating.

A festival about cinema—and power

This year, Venice arrives with a competition programme packed with some of the most recognisable names in international cinema.

Among the filmmakers competing for the Golden Lion are Werner Herzog, Martin McDonagh, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong, Nanni Moretti and Florian Zeller. In total, 21 films are competing in the festival’s principal section, making Venice once again one of the most important meeting points between European auteur cinema, Hollywood ambition and global filmmaking.

The festival’s influence extends far beyond the Italian coast.

Venice has become one of the major launchpads for awards-season campaigns, and a premiere on the Lido can dramatically alter a film’s trajectory before it ever reaches cinemas. In recent years, Venice has repeatedly provided an early stage for performances and films that later became central to the Academy Awards conversation.

But prestige has not insulated the festival from criticism.

The women behind—and missing from—the camera

One of the dominant conversations surrounding the 2026 competition has been gender representation.

Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy is the only woman listed as the sole director of a film in the main competition, with Woman Unknown. However, the wider picture is slightly more complicated than early criticism suggested: recent reporting has counted two competition entries as directed or co-directed by women.

The distinction matters, but so does the broader concern.

For an international festival of Venice’s stature, the debate has become symbolic of a much larger problem within the film industry: who receives financing, who gets access to major productions and whose stories are still considered worthy of the most prestigious stages.

The issue was impossible to ignore at the festival’s opening, particularly with filmmaker and actor Maggie Gyllenhaal presiding over the main competition jury. Gyllenhaal has spoken publicly about what she describes as systemic barriers facing women filmmakers, including the persistent difficulty of securing financing.

It is a striking paradox for contemporary cinema. The industry has never spoken more frequently about representation, yet the highest-profile competition line-ups can still reveal how unevenly opportunity is distributed.

Venice remains unlike any other festival

The Venice Film Festival was founded in 1932, making it the oldest international film festival in the world.

That history is visible everywhere on the Lido.

Unlike Cannes, with its famous Croisette, or Berlin, with its sprawling urban festival footprint, Venice exists in a landscape that feels almost deliberately cinematic. The journey itself is part of the ritual. Cars give way to boats. Red carpets meet canals. Film premieres unfold only a short distance from palazzi, beaches and the waters of the lagoon.

The festival is also part of the larger Venice Biennale, one of the world’s oldest cultural institutions, which has helped shape international conversations around art, architecture, dance, theatre, music and cinema for more than a century.

And in an age increasingly dominated by streaming platforms, algorithms and shortened attention spans, Venice’s continued importance is perhaps its own kind of statement.

For ten days, films are still events.

They are watched in theatres before they are clipped, reviewed, ranked, memed and consumed through a thousand smaller screens.

The story behind the stories

That brings us back to Ink.

There is a certain elegance in opening the world’s oldest film festival with a film about the industrialisation of attention.

Murdoch’s acquisition and transformation of The Sun represented a profound shift in the relationship between media and the public. The newspaper embraced a louder, more populist style of journalism designed not simply to inform readers, but to seize them.

Today, the technology is different. The battle for attention is not fought only on newsstands but across smartphones, social platforms and algorithmic feeds.

Yet the central question remains remarkably familiar:

Who decides which stories matter?

Venice 2026 is, in many ways, filled with different versions of that question.

Who has the power to make films? Who receives the funding? Whose perspective is considered universal? Which stories are rewarded with the industry’s most prestigious platforms? And how does cinema respond when politics, media and culture increasingly compete for the same increasingly fragmented audience?

For now, the answers are arriving one premiere at a time.

As the 83rd Venice Film Festival continues on the Lido, the glamour remains intact: the boats, the photographers, the fashion and the extraordinary concentration of international talent.

But beneath the spectacle, this year’s festival has already established its real theme.

Cinema is never only about what we see on screen.

It is also about who made us look.

For more information www.labiennale.org

Images courtesy of The 83rd Venice International Film Festival by La Biennale di Venezia @labiennale