VENICE: Danny Boyle’s Ink, the opening film of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, looks back to 1969, when Rupert Murdoch acquired the struggling British newspaper The Sun and recruited Larry Lamb to transform it into a radically different kind of tabloid. Adapted by James Graham from his Tony-nominated play, the film places Jack O’Connell’s Lamb and Guy Pearce’s Murdoch at the centre of a story about ambition, journalism and the creation of a media force that would ultimately reach far beyond Fleet Street. Claire Foy plays Jules Davies.   But this is no two hander bio-pic, Boyle turns a historical episode into a fast-moving piece of cinema.

VENICE: Robert Greene's Too Much Sugar, presented in the Orizzonti section at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, begins with a proposition: a charismatic Missouri father wants to make a movie about fatherhood. The documentary films in this year’s Venice form an especially strong body of work and while Too Much Sugar is not perhaps the strongest its insights into American society today makes it worthy of our attention despite its flaws as filmmaking.

VENICE: Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, presented in Competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, is a darkly comic political thriller about guilt, loyalty and the uneasy afterlife of violence. The film dares to confront the CIA history of murder and deceit. Set shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup in which the film makes clear the CIA played a pivotal role, the film follows two CIA operatives who are sent from Santiago to Easter Island by their superior, MJ. There, surrounded by the island’s monumental moai and far from the political upheaval unfolding on the mainland, their mission becomes increasingly tangled with old secrets and new conspiracies.

VENICE: Lance Oppenheim’s first narrative feature, Primetime which screens in competition in Venice 83 is a story about television, spectacle and the uneasy boundary between journalism and entertainment. Set in 2006, the film follows Chris Hansen, the host of To Catch a Predator, as he attempts to turn his controversial television operation into a cultural phenomenon. Robert Pattinson plays Hansen, surrounded by Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers, in a film that treats the early-2000s television landscape as both historical period and fever dream.

VENICE: Werner Herzog’s new film Bucking Fastard, which screened in Competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, focuses on two sisters whose closeness is so extreme that the distinction between individual and double begins to disappear. Jean and Joan Holbrooke, played by Kate Mara and Rooney Mara, speak in unison, love the same man and share the same dreams. Even their slips of the tongue arrive simultaneously. This is a strange film that leaves us wondering exactly what we are supposed to take away from this tale.

VENICE: Levan Koguashvili's Guria, presented in the Venice Spotlight section at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, looks back to western Georgia in the turbulent aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. But this is not a film interested in treating history as solemn background. Instead, Koguashvili finds comedy, romance and absurdity in a community struggling through poverty, unreliable electricity and social dislocation. This black and white Georgian-language tragicomedy whose apparent modesty conceals a remarkably generous portrait of people refusing to surrender their humanity and friendship despite difficult conditions.

FNE spoke to the head of the Estonian Film Institute following the recent MEDICI training programme in Tallinn for the heads of film funding bodies and why being a small country does not mean that a country should have a small voice in European film policy making.

FNE spoke to Beata Migas, Polish director, producer, screenwriter and CEO of Haddock Entertainment, talks about the importance of green filming and her own film projects.

VENICE: Latvian minority coproduction Woman Unknown by May el-Toukhy received the Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 83^rd edition of the Venice Film Festival, held 2 – 12 September 2026.