Every festival has a first night, and the first night sets the temperature for everything after it. On Wednesday 2 September the 83rd Venice International Film Festival opened at the Sala Grande with Ink, directed by Danny Boyle and written by James Graham — and the Lido, after a summer of waiting, went from empty to fully lit in the space of about ninety minutes.
A Newsroom Story to Open a Festival
Boyle arrived in Venice with a film about print, power and the machinery of the popular press, adapted by Graham from his own stage work. The cast brought to the Sala Grande — Jack O'Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy — is exactly the kind of ensemble Venice likes on an opening night: no shortage of star wattage, but weighted toward actors with theatre in their spines.
It is a pointed choice for a festival that has spent recent editions asking what cinema is for. Opening with a story about the manufacture of public attention, in a room full of people who manufacture public attention, is not a subtle gesture. It was not meant to be.
The First Carpet of the Edition
The opening red carpet is the one everyone reads for signals. This year it read black tie, sharply drawn, with the menswear doing more talking than usual. O'Connell arrived in custom Dior, setting an early marker for a festival where tailoring would turn out to be one of the running stories — a thread that only got stronger across the following ten days.
From our position between the risers, the opening night has a particular quality: the carpet is still crisp, the crowd on the Lungomare is at its loudest, and nobody is tired yet. The arrivals stack up fast, the light goes from gold to blue in about twenty minutes, and the whole sequence has to be captured twice over — once frozen, once moving.
Artistic director Alberto Barbera on the Sala Grande carpet. Venice Lido, 6 September 2026. Photo: @visual.twinsGyllenhaal's Jury Takes Its Seat
The opening ceremony also formally introduced the Venezia 83 jury, presided over by Maggie Gyllenhaal and made up of Kaouther Ben Hania, Daniel Blumberg, Francesco Casetti, Xavier Giannoli, Shahrbanoo Sadat and Johnnie To. A director-led jury with a documentarian, a composer, a film theorist and one of Hong Kong's great genre craftsmen in the room: on paper, a group unlikely to agree quickly. Eleven days later, their verdict would confirm it.
Gyllenhaal herself set one of the edition's visual notes on that first night, in black — the colour that would end up dominating the Lido from the jury bench outward.
Black tie, sharply drawn: the register that held for the whole edition. Venice Lido, 6 September 2026. Photo: @visual.twinsThe Excelsior Takes Over
Once the Sala Grande emptied, the evening moved where it always moves: the Hotel Excelsior, the building that hosted the very first Mostra back in 1932 and still functions as the festival's centre of gravity. Its beach carries the opening ceremony, its terraces carry everything after, and its landing stage carries the arrivals that never make the official photo call.
Opening night at the Excelsior is the closest the festival comes to a single room containing the entire edition — every distributor, every publicist, every talent team, all in one place before the competition has had time to create winners and losers.
Eleven Days to Go
Ink set the frame. What followed — a lifetime achievement Lion for George Clooney, a competition running from Herzog to Kore-eda to Lee Chang-dong, and a red carpet that quietly rewrote black tie — filled it in.
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