A video about the press conference in Venice Lido:

The pressman asked madonna if she would give up on everything for love as the protagonist (o leading actor) of her film W.E

John Le Carrè about “Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy“, presented yesterday at 68.Venice International Film Festival, “ Gary Oldman‘s George Smiley, from the moment he appears, is a man waiting patiently to explode. The danger, the pressed-down fury and the humanity that almost doesn‘t manage to keep its head above the parapet of despair, are Oldman‘s own. If I were to meet the Smiley of Alec Guinness on a dark night, my instinct would be to go to his protection. If I met Oldman‘s, I think I just might make a run for it.
The film, through my very personal prism, is a triumph. And if people write to me and say, How could you let this happen to poor Alec Guinness,‘ I shall reply that, if Alec‘ had witnessed Oldman‘s performance, he would have been the first to give it a standing ovation.
It‘s not the film of the book. It‘s the film of the film, and to my eye a work of art in its own right. I‘m very proud to have provided Alfredson with the material, but what he made of it is wonderfully his own.” TD

A video fron Press Conference with Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt e Tom Hardy.

See our video about Conference Call with George Clooney

Many famous guests will be bringing the Lancia Café to life, starting with Maurizio Galimberti, one of Italy’s most important contemporary photographers and particularly highly regarded by film stars for his style and original technique. Once more, Galimberti’s presence this year, complete with Polaroid, is the ideal occasion to immortalise the actors of the Lancia Café.

Next events: on Tuesday 6 September Steve McQueen will make a long-awaited return to the delight of his fans. Following his magnificent debut with “Hunger”, he has made a return to directing with the film “Shame” starring Carey Mulligan and Michael Fassbender. The delegation arriving at the Lancia Café on Wednesday 7 September will instead be 100% Italian. Cristina Comencini will make her appearance at the Venice event with the movie “Quando la notte” with Claudia Pandolfi and Filippo Timi. Then it will be the turn of the cast of “Killer Joe” by William Friedkin with Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple on Friday 9 September. TD

Venice Lido International Film Festival

Madonna was in Venice yesterday, 1st September 2011, to present her film W.E. that is a beautifully crafted, passionate tale about Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII: the search for true love in the modern world, viewed through the prism of one of history’s most fabled romances.

Writer and director Madonna had been developing the idea for W.E. for many years. She had long held a fascination with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, yet she was not interested in making a conventional biopic. She sought instead to capture the essence of their romance and convey her interpretation of one of the greatest love stories of the 20th Century. She says: “Truth is subjective. Everything I have to say about the Duke and Duchess is the conclusion I came to after all my research. I wanted to present a more well-rounded portrayal of Wallis than was commonly known. I created the Wally character because the movie needed a point of view. Wally goes on a journey thinking this is the greatest love story only to realise that it wasn’t such a perfect love and that both of them made huge sacrifices.

Tania Danieli

3rd September 2010

On September 3rd 2010 the Great Hall of Palazzo del Cinema host the ceremony to John Woo’s for Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement at the 67th International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art in Venice.

The ceremony was followed by screening the world premiere of Jianyu (Reign of Assassins), the film by Su Chao-Pin, produced by Terence Chang, John Woo’s signature in the supervision and direction. Jianyu (Reign of Assassins), boasts of a variegated cast composed of, beside the protagonist such as the queen of Asian action films Michelle Yeoh, the Korean superstar Jung Woo Sung, and the Chinese and Taiwanese stars Barbie Hsu, Wang Xueqi, Kelly Lin and Angeles Woo.TD

30th August,
Arena Campo San Polo,
screening of ‘Vittorio tells Gassman’

The 67th International Film Festival of Venice will pay homage to Vittorio Gassman, one of the most extraordinary personalities of Italian cinema, on the tenth anniversary of his death, with a special programme consisting in a world premiere screening on the 1st September (Gassman’s birthdate) in the Sala Perla, of ‘Vittorio tells Gassman’, Una Vita Da Mattatore (80’) a ‘confession-film by Vittorio Gassman’ full of unknown sequences, realized by Giancarlo Scarchilli with the collaboration of Alessandro Gassman and the projection – on 31st August at the Arena di Campo San Polo – of a restored version of Dino Risi’s Scent Of A Woman (1974) with Vittorio Gassman (Best Actor Prize at Cannes and the David di Donatello ), Alessandro Momo and Agostina Belli,  as a production of the National Film Archive. TD

The famous American producer and director George Lucas, creator of the revolutionary Star Wars saga and a leader in Hollywood’s digital revolution, will present John Lasseter with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the 66th Venice International Film Festival, on the 6th September 2009, together with the directors of Disney-Pixar Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich. George Lucas, director and producer, who has transformed the cinema industry with Star Wars – the saga symbol of post-modern movie- and who started the spectacular era of visual effects with his Industrial Light & Magic Division (founded in 1975), will be attending the Venice Film Festival for the first time. Though, actually, just at Lido in the Eighties, the two final episodes of the Skywalker Family’s adventures, written and produced by Lucas, were presented in a European première screening, with a great success and enthusiasm by the public. The presentation of the Golden Lion to John Lasseter by George Lucas is particularly significant: Lasseter – before the foundation of Pixar in 1986 – used to work in the graphics group of the Computer Animation Division of Lucasfilm (the company founded by Lucas in  1971). At Lucasfilm, Lasseter also designed and animated the stained glass knight of Pyramid of Fear (Young Sherlock Holmes, 1985), the first character ever realized by computer for a live-action film. In 1986 Apple founder Steve Jobs bought the Computer Animation Division of Lucasfilm, naming it Pixar, after the high- performance computer the division had developed.

The tribute to Lasseter with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the Film Festival 2009 will take place during a special ceremony on Sunday 6th September at 4.30 p.m. in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema at Venice Lido. Before the awards ceremony there will be the screening of the new 3D version of Toy Story. After the tribute there will be the screening of the 3D version of Toy Story 2.

12th september 2009

We have just learnt that on 12th September, in the Sala Grande del Palazzo del Cinema al Lido, during the closing ceremony of the 66th International Film Festival, the American film director, scriptwriter and actor Sylvester Stallone will be awarded with the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award. Such Award has been ideated recently by the International Film Festival of Venice and organized by the Festival in cooperation with Jaeger-LeCoultre, and it will be dedicated to a personality that has left a mark on contemporary cinema. Previous Awards were given to Takeshi Kitano, Agnès Varda and Abbas Kiarostami. The Award aims at celebrating the greatness as a filmmaker of Sylvester Stallone, as an author of a kind of movie which is already extremely original and full of tenderness (even when dripping with blood), starting from the amazing night competition on the roofs which is the background for the opening credits of his first film as a scriptwriter/director, Paradise Alley. Through the, by this time, mythical truthfulness of Rocky and Rambo (all the scripts are his), films always extraordinarily in sync with their times, Stallone has explored the brightest and darkest areas of the American dream.” And his work on ‘his’ character – which can be found also in apparently ‘minor’ films or in films not directed by him – is considered one of the most coherent and brilliant in USA contemporary movies. TD