Danny Boyle‘s Ink, a drama about Rupert Murdoch’s rise to media power in the world of the U.K. tabloids, will open this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Ink will have its world premiere in competition in Venice, opening the 83rd festival on Sept. 2.
Guy Pearce stars as Murdoch in the biographical drama, from playwright James Graham, who adapted his Tony-nominated play of the same name for the screen. Jack O’Connell (Sinners) plays Larry Lamb, hired by Murdoch to run his new British tabloid The Sun and transform it into a dark force in British media. Claire Foy plays Jules Davies.
This will mark Boyle’s first time on the Lido. “This is my baptism at the film festival,” Boyle said, calling it “a huge honor to be in a city of such extraordinary art and opening this great festival with my new film.”
Ink is set in 1969, the year Murdoch and Lamb launched The Sun, a paper that, with it far-right political reporting and populist rabble rousing, became hugely successful and set the template for new media era.
