The Venice Film Festival announced its 83rd program on July 23, and the headline attractions read like a syllabus on power and the media. The festival opens September 2 with Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” the story of Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 purchase of The Sun, with Guy Pearce as Murdoch, Jack O’Connell as Larry Lamb — the editor hired to remake the paper — and Claire Foy. Elsewhere in the lineup: Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary “Musk”; Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary “Imperium”; “They’re Here,” a short documentary on immigration enforcement from Laura Poitras and Rachel Mueller; and Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” a CIA story set on the eve of the 1973 Chilean coup, with John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell and Steve Buscemi.
One of the twenty films in the main competition is directed by a woman: May El-Toukhy’s “Woman Unknown.”
The festival as opposition newsroom
Read as one document, the program examines newspaper ownership, technological oligarchy, immigration enforcement, covert power and propaganda. That is not a film slate so much as an institutional beat sheet — the kind of coverage assignments a large newsroom would have distributed among its investigative desks, in the era when newsrooms had investigative desks to spare.
The opening film is the origin story of the problem the rest of the program is covering. When Murdoch bought The Sun in 1969 it was a failing broadsheet; he relaunched it as a tabloid and built from it a model in which a proprietor’s papers could claim to move electorates — by 1992 The Sun was boasting, in a headline its own executives later disavowed, that it had won a British election. Boyle’s film and Gibney’s documentary bookend the half-century arc that followed: the power to set the public agenda passing from press barons to platform owners, from Fleet Street to the feed. Venice is screening the beginning and the current chapter in the same week.
There is a practical economics underneath the curatorial one. A four-hour examination of the world’s richest man is exactly the kind of project a diminished newsroom can no longer fund, and festival prestige — plus the streaming acquisitions it attracts — has become part of how such scrutiny gets financed. Poitras is the clean example of the migration: a journalist whose surveillance reporting shared a Pulitzer, and whose previous documentary won this festival’s Golden Lion. The accountability work has not disappeared. It has changed buildings.
Which makes the competition’s own arithmetic harder to ignore: a program devoted to auditing concentrated power admits one woman among its twenty competition directors. Institutional criticism, it turns out, is easier to screen than to practice.
