The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opens Wednesday on the Lido, kicking off eleven days of premieres, awards-season jockeying and, this year, an unusually public fight over how much room the festival will make for politics.
The event opens with the world premiere of Danny Boyle's "Ink," a newsroom drama starring Jack O'Connell as tabloid editor Larry Lamb, Guy Pearce as a young Rupert Murdoch and Claire Foy, dramatizing the 1969 remaking of The Sun into a mass-market tabloid. The film, adapted by James Graham from his own Olivier Award-winning stage play, screens in Sala Grande and competes for the festival's top prize, the Golden Lion.
Presiding over that competition is a jury led by actress-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, joined by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, musician-composer Daniel Blumberg, critic Francesco Casetti, director Xavier Giannoli, Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat and Hong Kong director Johnnie To. They will weigh a 21-film competition slate that includes new work from Martin McDonagh, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nanni Moretti and Lee Chang-dong, before the festival closes September 12 with Giovanni Veronesi's "God Laughs." Career Golden Lions go this year to Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney.
A press conference nearly scrapped
The run-up to opening night was dominated less by film talk than by a scheduling dispute. Festival organizers signaled in late August that the traditional opening-day jury press conference — a fixture where journalists question the jury president and members before the festival begins — was in doubt, citing what they described only as a "scheduling conflict." After industry pushback, Venice reversed course within days, and organizers confirmed the session would proceed as usual on opening day, alongside individual film press conferences including one for "Ink."
The episode drew scrutiny in part because of what happened at last year's edition. In 2025, the opening jury press conference was dominated by questions about the war in Gaza, and then-jury president Alexander Payne said afterward he had felt "unprepared" to answer one such question — a moment widely replayed online and read by some critics as the festival's jury being caught flat-footed on politics. That backdrop fed speculation, denied by organizers, that this year's near-cancellation was an attempt to insulate Gyllenhaal's jury from similar questioning rather than a genuine logistics problem.
A push to put Palestine "in the spotlight"
Separately, more than 200 film industry figures have signed an open letter organized by the group Venice4Palestine, titled "Yet Gaza Continues to Burn," urging the festival and its parent organization, the Venice Biennale, to take a more visible stance. Signatories include Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, directors Matteo Garrone, Isabel Coixet and Céline Sciamma, and actors Guy Pearce and Alia Shawkat, among others.
"We ask the exhibition to also hoist the Palestinian flag for the duration of the festival."
Venice4Palestine open letter
The letter points to the presence of two Palestinian productions in this year's official selection — Ahmed Hassouna's "Citizen Osama" and Muayad Alayan's "Conversation with the Sea" — as reason for the festival to fly the Palestinian flag alongside those of other participating nations for the duration of the event. Festival organizers have not publicly detailed how, or whether, they will respond to the request; the two films are proceeding as scheduled in the official lineup.
None of this has displaced the films themselves as the festival's central business. Beyond the opening night and the Boyle drama, the eleven days on the Lido will bring the first extended round of reviews for several awards-season hopefuls, with the Golden Lion and other juried prizes to be announced at the closing ceremony September 12 — the traditional starting gun for a fall festival circuit that runs on through Telluride and Toronto.
For now, attention returns to Wednesday's jury press conference itself, reinstated but freighted with the same questions that dogged last year's session, as reporters on the Lido weigh whether Gyllenhaal's jury will field them any differently than Payne's did.
