The Mayor of London's Gala at the 70th BFI London Film Festival is the UK premiere of Danny Boyle's Ink, with Guy Pearce and Jack O'Connell, at the Royal Festival Hall on 12 October 2026.
Danny Boyle was born in Lancashire in 1956 and came to film from the theatre, making Shallow Grave in 1994, which won the BAFTA for Best British Film, and Trainspotting two years later, which reset what a British film could look and sound like. Slumdog Millionaire won him the Academy Award and the BAFTA for direction in 2008, and in 2012 he staged the Olympic opening ceremony in Stratford. He has collected an Academy Award, two BAFTAs, a Golden Globe and an Emmy, and returned to horror in the 2020s with 28 Years Later.
Ink is his account of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of a London newspaper in 1969 and of Larry Lamb, the editor he hired to remake it. James Graham adapted his own stage play, and Guy Pearce and Jack O’Connell play the two men, with Claire Foy alongside them. It is Boyle doing what he has done for thirty years, which is to take a British institution and film it from the inside.
The UK premiere is at the Royal Festival Hall on Monday 12 October 2026 at 9pm, as the Mayor of London’s Gala. The film runs 118 minutes and shows again in the same hall the following morning at eleven. Boyle appears separately in conversation during the Festival, and STUDIOCANAL releases the film in Britain afterwards.