Venice acts as a sounding board for the ongoing protest in Hollywood. The Writers Guild is on strike! (literally “The Writers Guild is on strike”) is the message printed on the T-shirt worn today by Damien Chazelle during a press conference for the members of the 80th Venice Film Festival jury. The President of the Jury, whose task it will be to award the Golden Lions to films in competition at the Lido Festival, thus does not miss the opportunity to send a strong signal in support of the 101-day strike of the studio writers, in which the actors joined the Sag-Aftra union in last month. For this reason, the actors of three American productions will not be presented in Venice this year: Murderer David Fincher Poor things Yorgos Lanthimos e Owner Bradley Cooper.
Film festival, let’s go. Opens “Comandante” with Pierfrancesco Favino.
Regarding the strike, Chazelle explained, “The idea is that each work of art has its own value, not just a contribution to the content to be put into development.” For director La La Land, cinematic art “should be sustainable”, but this idea “was ignored”. “People need to be paid for works of art,” he stressed, “and while we must glorify them, we must remember this.”
Exhibition director Alberto Barbera confirmed both absence and presence. “At this point,” he said, “we know for sure that the actors of the three films associated with streaming platforms or studios will not be attending. There will be no cast from the Lanthimos film, as well as actors from the Fincher and Bradley Cooper film. It’s just that Cooper, seen in Venice in recent days, “greatly regretted not being there.” On the red carpet of the Palazzo del Cinema there will not even be a cast The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar Wes Anderson. Instead, the presence of Adam Driver is confirmed in ferrariJessica Chastain for Memoryand the entire cast Priscilla Sofia Coppola.
The impact of Hollywood’s double strike on this festival will be, “but not as severe as one might think when the protest was announced,” Barbera repeated today.