Venice Film Festival cops criticism

By ROGER CLARKE

The leading showbiz lights of the anti-globalisation movement have descended on Venice amid complaints that the world's oldest film festival has sold out to the Hollywood glamour industry.

Actor Tim Robbins and author Naomi Klein were there to launch the Global Beach, an alternative "festival" down the road from the main event, and expected to get the backing of actor-director Spike Lee and gay indie-punk star Gregg Araki.

Both Robbins and Klein are noted critics of Hollywood customs and of the failure of their fellow actors to criticise their corporate bosses. They have become increasingly active in United States politics and political film-making.

Robbins, in Venice with the British film Code 42, by Michael Winterbottom, has already used the main festival to make a thinly veiled attack on Hollywood actors who have failed to follow his critical stance on the war in Iraq.

Klein flew in to promote her film The Take, an account of a co-operative business set up by Argentine workers after the 2001 economic collapse, directed by radical Canadian journalist Avi Lewis.

Supporters of the Global Beach project caused disturbances at the premiere of The Terminal, directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, which opened the festival. Members of the group parked a car transformed into a a pirate ship near the red carpet as a protest against the "ostentatious show of Hollywood wealth and power".

There has been an unusually large number of American films, some of which - including the Spielberg film - have already opened in the US.

Venice has also seen a deluge of Hollywood A-listers - Hanks, Tom Cruise and Robert De Niro among others - and to this extent the event has already been judged a success. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, appointed the festival director, Marco Muller, specifically to steal the thunder of an anti-American Cannes and turn it into the premier Hollywood junket in Europe.

The weekend saw the premieres of Finding Neverland, a new take on J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, starring Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp, and The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino.

Shakespeare buff Pacino plays Shylock in director Michael Radford's film, which also stars Joseph Fiennes and Jeremy Irons.

De Niro arrives this week to promote his animated film Shark Tales, which will be screened in St Mark's Palazzo. But the film has attracted less publicity than the honorary Italian citizenship awarded to him by Berlusconi last week.

A plan to give it to him at the festival was scuppered by De Niro himself. A lobby of Italian-Americans, the Washington-based Sons of Italy, had tried hard to stop the Godfather star from receiving citizenship at all, claiming his mafia roles had damaged perceptions of Italian-Americans.

It is said Berlusconi will have an uphill struggle placating them after such a gesture - initially perceived as a naked Venice Festival stunt.

- INDEPENDENT