The 83rd Venice International Film Festival will open on 2 September 2026 with Danny Boyle's Ink, a drama about Rupert Murdoch's 1969 acquisition of the Sun newspaper, as artistic director Alberto Barbera unveiled the festival's lineup on 23 July (The Guardian).

Ink, scripted by Olivier award-winning playwright James Graham, will have its world premiere in the Sala Grande on the Lido di Venezia, where the festival runs through 12 September (La Biennale). Australian actor Guy Pearce plays Murdoch, with Jack O'Connell and Claire Foy also starring (Screen Daily; Deadline). The international competition comprises a maximum of 21 feature-length world premieres (La Biennale).

Martin McDonagh returns to the Lido with Wild Horse Nine, set in Chile on the eve of the Augusto Pinochet coup. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA agents, with Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, and Parker Posey rounding out the cast. The selection situates McDonagh's film within Venice's long-running appetite for politically charged auteur cinema set against the backdrop of Cold War interventions in Latin America.

Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary Musk, profiling Elon Musk, screens out of competition. The placement outside the competition framework allows for an extended-format work that would not fit the standard feature-length slots. Two other documentary heavyweights also appear on the slate: Laura Poitras returns with They're Here, and Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa presents Imperium, a title whose Latin register suggests a scope consistent with Loznitsa's body of work on power and historical memory.

The intersection of geopolitical conflict and cinema is further sharpened by the inclusion of Russian-born filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who will show a film from his Dar project. Khrzhanovsky's presence at a major European festival is notable given the ongoing cultural reckoning within European institutions over the programming of Russian artists since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Loznitsa, a prominent Ukrainian voice, sharing the same festival slate adds a layer of institutional tension that the Venice selection committee has not shied away from in recent editions.

Werner Herzog returns to dramatic filmmaking after a seven-year hiatus with Bucking Fastard, starring Kate Mara and Rooney Mara as sisters. Florian Zeller, whose The Father trilogy established him as a dramatist of cognitive and emotional disintegration, brings Bunker, starring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. A24's Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim and starring Robert Pattinson, takes inspiration from the US reality television program To Catch a Predator, transposing the entrapment-entertainment format into a psychological thriller key.

Music documentaries provide the festival's celebrity bookends. An Oasis reunion documentary, Don't Look Back in Anger, will premiere with both Liam and Noel Gallagher confirmed to attend. Russell Crowe is expected on the Lido for What Love Builds, a feature-length documentary about his band Indoor Garden Party.

The programming signals Venice's continued strategy of balancing auteur-driven competition entries with high-profile out-of-competition premieres that generate global media coverage. The decision to open with Ink places media power and its historical entanglements front and center on a festival circuit that has, across recent editions, shown increasing willingness to program films interrogating the ownership and influence structures behind news and information. The simultaneous presence of the Gibney Musk documentary and the Murdoch drama invites an inevitable, if informal, throughline about the concentration of media and technology platforms across decades.

What remains to be assessed is how the competition jury, whose composition La Biennale has yet to finalize, will weigh a slate this politically varied against the festival's Golden Lion criteria. With the complete lineup still being finalized ahead of the end-of-July announcement window, additional competition titles may further sharpen or complicate the thematic contours already visible in this initial selection.