Festivals & Events

The stars are ready to celebrate their films here even if the Lido is not: in the afternoon of opening day construction was still not done in front of the Palazzo del Cinema and the adjacent Casino that houses the press office facilities during the festival. While hordes of fans – mostly minors – were camping out for hours with umbrellas to shield them from the sun and the extreme heat behind the barriers at the red carpet, workers were still busy nailing down the floor and removing plastic sheeting.

There was almost as much white off-screen as on: while the festival audience on opening night watched climbers fighting for their lives on a snow covered Everest, the two most glamorous members of the jury walked the red carpet in breathtaking white gowns. Elizabeth Banks dazzled in a backless Dolce & Gabbana while Diane Kruger wore a sweet but sexy Prada.

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The beachfront Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido got a taste of high altitude as the Venice Film festival opened with a screening of Baltásar Kormakur’s Everest a fictional telling of dramatic real-life mountaineering. The Mount Everest climbing season of 1996 will forever be remembered as one of the most tragic in the annals of mountain climbing.

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Boats, pasta and amore may provide the backdrop to the Venice festival but it is cinema that matters most. This year more than ever.

The HFPA’s Silvia Bizio spoke exclusively to the actress who graces the festival’s poster. Nastassja Kinski will be at the Venice Film Festival, not as lead actress of a film as she has many times in the past, but as the festival icon.

D23 is Disney’s response to Comic-Con, a “fan fest” designed to foster maximum engagement and excitement for the studio projects, memorabilia and that elusive (and lucrative) concept: Disney culture. So on the weekend of August 14-15, when temperatures soared over 100 degrees throughout Southern California, the studio gathered fans and media at the Anaheim Convention Center for the fourth D23 Expo – the bi-annual celebration of all things Disney.

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