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

Ink was written by James Graham, an award-winning playwright. It will have its world premiere — meaning the first public screening anywhere — in the Sala Grande, the main theater at the festival's home on the Lido di Venezia. The festival runs through 12 September (La Biennale). Guy Pearce plays Murdoch, with Jack O'Connell and Claire Foy also starring (Screen Daily; Deadline). The international competition, where films compete for the festival's top prize called the Golden Lion, includes a maximum of 21 feature-length world premieres (La Biennale).

Martin McDonagh returns to Venice with Wild Horse Nine, set in Chile just before the 1973 military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play CIA agents, with Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, and Parker Posey also in the cast. Venice has a long history of favoring films by distinctive director-authors that tackle politics, especially stories connected to Cold War involvement in Latin America.

Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary Musk, about Elon Musk, will screen out of competition. Films shown out of competition do not compete for the Golden Lion; this category lets the festival include longer or unusual works that do not fit the standard feature-length slots. Two other major documentary filmmakers are also on the slate: Laura Poitras returns with They're Here, and Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa presents Imperium. The Latin title suggests a broad scope, consistent with Loznitsa's past work on power and historical memory.

The festival also includes Russian-born filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who will show a film from his Dar project. His presence at a major European festival is notable because European institutions have been debating whether to program Russian artists since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Loznitsa, a prominent Ukrainian filmmaker, appearing on the same festival lineup adds a layer of tension that Venice's selection committee has not avoided in recent years.

Werner Herzog returns to dramatic filmmaking after a seven-year break with Bucking Fastard, starring Kate Mara and Rooney Mara as sisters. Florian Zeller, known for The Father trilogy about memory and emotional breakdown, 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 TV show To Catch a Predator, turning the entrapment-entertainment format into a psychological thriller.

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 at the festival for What Love Builds, a documentary about his band Indoor Garden Party.

The broader context here is that Venice's programming reflects a deliberate strategy: balancing serious competition films with big-name premieres outside the competition that draw global media attention. Opening with Ink puts media power and its history at the center of a festival circuit that has, in recent years, increasingly chosen films examining who owns and controls the news. Having both the Musk documentary and the Murdoch drama on the same program creates an informal but natural connection between the concentration of media power in the past and the concentration of technology platforms today.

What is not yet clear is how the competition jury — whose members La Biennale has not yet announced — will weigh such a politically varied group of films against the Golden Lion criteria. The full lineup is still being finalized before the end-of-July announcement window, and additional competition titles may further sharpen or complicate the themes already visible in this initial selection.