The world's oldest film festival opens this year not with a dream but with a printing press. Ink, Danny Boyle's account of the young Rupert Murdoch buying The Sun — Guy Pearce as the proprietor, Jack O'Connell as his editor Larry Lamb — is the opening film of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, running 2–12 September. It is a pointed way to begin: cinema, the medium that spent a century asking us to believe pictures, turning to examine the machine that taught the world to stop.
We spent part of this summer at Arles, where photography was busy relearning the second look — the festival's whole theme was doubt. Venice, it turns out, has arrived at the same anxiety from the other side of the lens, and built a competition around it.
Twenty premieres and the ghost of Kieślowski
The Venezia 83 competition holds twenty films, all world premieres, and the quietest of them may be the largest event: Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, his first film in eight years since Burning — two married couples, a cast led by Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu, and a stated debt to Kieślowski's Dekalog, the second film this year to reach for that moral scaffolding. Hirokazu Kore-eda brings Look Back; Martin McDonagh sets Wild Horse Nine in the last days before the Chilean coup of 1973. And Werner Herzog, having walked Bucking Fastard away from Cannes rather than screen it out of competition, gives the Lido its strangest image: Kate and Rooney Mara as twin sisters so inseparable they seem one soul operating two bodies, digging toward an imaginary land. Doubles, parables, tunnels to places that do not exist — the festival's unofficial theme assembles itself.
A jury of makers
The jury votes with its own filmographies. Maggie Gyllenhaal presides — the actress who remade herself as a director and took Venice's screenplay prize in 2021 with The Lost Daughter; festival director Alberto Barbera calls her eye “both intellectual and visceral”, which is as good a two-word definition of this magazine's beat as we have heard. Around her sit Kaouther Ben Hania, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat and Johnnie To, with the composer Daniel Blumberg and the scholar Francesco Casetti — a table where nearly everyone has had to answer for a final cut. The career Golden Lions go to George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn: two faces from the age when the screen was still believed on sight, honoured in the year the industry debates what a picture is worth.
Eleven days of credit
It is fashionable to say festivals no longer matter, that the real premiere is the trailer and the real jury is the algorithm. Venice's answer is architectural: an island, a darkened room, and a contract — two hours of belief, granted in advance, to one image at a time. That contract is the rarest commodity in the visual economy now, rarer than any lion. Kubrick started as a boy who trusted what his camera saw; the medium he grew into spends this September asking whether we still do. The Lido is where the question gets its eleven days in court — opening, fittingly, with the man who sold the world its doubt at thruppence a copy.