Venice will open its 83rd edition — in competition, not the safe gala slot — with Danny Boyle's portrait of Rupert Murdoch buying The Sun, and the choice is an argument before it is a film.
Venice has chosen its first image. On 2 September the 83rd edition opens on the Lido with Danny Boyle's *Ink*, and — unusually for an opening night — it opens *in competition*, eligible for the Golden Lion that Maggie Gyllenhaal's jury will hand out on the 12th. Adapted from James Graham's stage play, the film follows Rupert Murdoch's 1969 purchase of *The Sun* and the year a failing broadsheet was remade into Britain's best-selling paper on a diet of sport, sex and cheerful reaction. Guy Pearce plays the young Murdoch; Jack O'Connell is Larry Lamb, the editor who built the machine; Claire Foy rounds out the cast. A festival that spends eleven days defending the auteur has decided to begin with a portrait of the man who did more than anyone to perfect the opposite instinct: find out what the public wants, then sell it back at volume.
The gala slot as an argument
The choice reads as deliberate on two counts. Opening films are usually parked out of competition — a red-carpet handshake, glamour without stakes. Putting *Ink* in the race changes the register. Venice is not merely showing the film; it is asking its jury of makers to weigh it against Koreeda, Lee Chang-dong, McDonagh, Herzog — to judge the machinery of the tabloid by the standards of the medium's most stubborn authors. And the subject is the festival's own shadow. A tabloid is the purest engine of the market logic that auteur cinema exists to resist: audience as aggregate, taste as data, the front page retuned nightly to whatever moves copies. To launch an auteur festival on that story is to name, on the first night, the pressure the rest of the programme will spend a fortnight pushing back against.
A festival built to defend the difficult film has opened on the biography of the man who proved the easy one always outsells it — and dropped him into competition, where the argument is fought rather than merely posed.
There is a sharper edge this year of all years. Venice has spent the decade consolidating its role as the autumn launchpad, courting streamer money and awards-season heat while still insisting, jury by jury, that it stands for the author and not the market. Opening on Murdoch is either supreme confidence or a tell: the festival stages the origin story of mass persuasion on the same stage where it asks to be trusted as art's advocate. Boyle, no stranger to crowd-pleasing, is the right hand for the job — which is its own small provocation. Whether *Ink* flatters its subject or takes him apart, we won't know until the lights go down. But the programming sentence is already legible. Before a single frame screens, Venice has told us it is willing to begin with the question the rest of the festival is supposed to answer.