Venice Film Festival begins today with “Ink” by Danny Boyle

“Ink” discusses the creation of the British tabloid The Sun, by Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb, who, “against all expectations, became the world’s best-selling newspaper,” as Danny Boyle described.

The film is starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy and is part of Ali Asgari’s official Golden Lion competition, which features twenty other feature films, such as “Bucking Fastard”, by Werner Herzog, “A Bit of Light”, described as “a painful film about opponents of the Iranian regime who despair for a change”, “Wild Horse Nine”, by Martin McDonagh, and “Look Back”, by Hirokazu Koreeda.

The Italian press underlines Nanni Moretti’s return to the Venice festival competition with “It will happen tonight”, 37 years after the controversial withdrawal of the film “Palombella Rossa”.

The choice of the film “DAU” by the Russian dissident Ilya Khrzhanovsky, which prompted protests from Ukraine and led the artistic director of the festival, Alberto Barbera, to explain that “it is not a pro-Putin propaganda film”, but rather “a complaint about totalitarian regimes”.

Of the Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who coassigned the award-winning “No Other Land”, Venice will exhibit in the “NAZA” competition, a documentary shot in one night on terraces in Tel Aviv and which, according to the synopsis, denounces “in detail Israel’s methods of mass deliberate extermination of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”.

At the festival there will be still “Joie de vivre”, Luca Guadagnino’s seven-hour film about Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, “Musk”, by Alex Gibney about Elon Musk’s magnate, and “Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger”, by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace.

The program also includes the Portuguese co-production “The Hard Bride”, by the director Bengali Rubaiyat Hossain, with photography direction of Leonor Teles, participation of Portuguese technical team and financial support from the Cinema Institute and Audiovisual.

“The Hard Bride” is a film “of great formal exuberance and jubilatory tone” and “portraits a young woman in the preparation process of her marriage”, says Midas Filmes, who co-produced it.

In the Classics section, the film “Udju Azul di Yonta” by the Guinean director Flora Gomes will be shown in a version restored by the Portuguese Cinemateca.

In one of the parallel events of the festival, director Pedro Costa will receive on Saturday the Italian film award Robert Bresson, awarded by Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo with the patronage of the Holy See.

The Robert Bresson Prize annually recognizes a person in the cinema who “has given a testimony, relevant for his sincerity and intensity, about the difficult path of seeking the spiritual meaning of our life”, says the organization on the official page.

The 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival ends on September 12 with Giovanni Veronesi's film "Dio Ride".

Today actor George Clooney receives the career Golden Lion, while actress Ellen Burstyn is recognized with the same award on the 7th.

The actress and director Maggie Gyllenhaal presides over the jury.