The Venice Film Festival kicked off on a defiantly humanist note on Wednesday with speeches from Life Achievement Awardee George Clooney and jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal championing the power of cinema as a unifier in divisive times.
Praising the festival as an extraordinary meeting place, Clooney used his award speech to stress the need for humanity to understand its similarities, rather than dwell on differences.
“This is what I’ve learned,” said Clooney as he took stock of his career and life thus far on receiving the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
“Nobody laughs in a different language. Nobody cries in a different language. Parents worry the same, kids dream the same. Love looks remarkably similar… which makes it hard to believe that we’re as different as we’re constantly being told.
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“We’re living through a moment in time where people in charge, the people with the most money, are telling us to fear one another. But we know better than that, don’t we? Because history does teach us a lesson. It teaches us something. The first people that authoritarians tried to shut down are not politicians. They’re journalists who ask questions. They’re the artists who refuse simple answers; the filmmakers, writers, actors, and musicians who insist that someone you never met, someone you have never met, is deserving of your empathy.
“Stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear, the people who are afraid of books and music and stories are never the heroes in history. So yes, movies don’t stop wars, they don’t lower inflation, they don’t fix elections, but they do something remarkable. They remind us that a stranger is never a stranger, and that he might just be the hero in somebody else’s story.”
Prior to receiving the award, Laura Dern delivered a Laudatio celebrating the actor, director and producer’s achievements.
Dern has been a longtime friend of Clooney ever since they co-starred in his first movie, the unreleased Hungary-shot 1980s horror movie Grizzly II: Revenge about bear that goes on the rampage in Yellowstone National Park.
The Venice regular was at the festival with Clooney last year as part of the cast of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly which world premiered in competition.
She opened her speech noting that Clooney is one of only three people to be nominated for Oscars in six categories throughout his career in categories spanning best director, lead actor, supporting actor, and both original and adapted screenplay.
She went on to suggest that Clooney was the Gregory Peck of her generation.
“I first had the privilege of getting to know Gregory Peck,” she said. “When I met him, I thought a Renaissance Man like that would truly be a forever one of a kind. But my generation got one too.”
Gyllenhaal who is the jury president echoed Clooney’s words on the power of cinema.
“When I go to the movies, I’m not interested in perfection, seductive as it may be. My favorite films are films where a filmmaker invites me into their mind and the minds of their collaborators and lets me take a look around,” she said.
“I’m interested in having an interaction with something human, even if that human has a very different experience or point of view than I do. I’m also not someone who believes that we can only make art about certain things and by certain people. I want to know. I want to be rocked, shaken up. I want my mind to be changed,” she continued.
“I think that when we tell stories about even the most perverse, corrupt characters, it allows us to find empathy for the corruption and perversity all around us, and even-and this, of course, is scariest of all-inside of us, I don’t know about you, but there, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Gyllenhaal is joined in the jury by Tunisian The Voice of Hind Rajab director and screenwriter Kaouther Ben Hania; English composer and artist Daniel Blumberg, Italian professor Francesco Casetti, French director and screenwriter Xavier Giannoli, the Afghan director and screenwriter Shahrbanoo Sadat, and the Hong Kong director and producer Johnnie To.
The festival opens this year with Danny Boyle’s drama Ink, following the rise of the UK’s notorious tabloid newspaper The Sun in the 1970s, a publication that ironically did not have the same unifying power as the festival where the film is premiering.
