As Venice Film Festival reckons with where politics belong at the annual event, George Clooney did not mince words in his acceptance speech for a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. On Wednesday, the movie star delivered an urgent speech about the place of stories in the fight against fascism.
“Stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear,” Clooney said. “The people who are afraid of books and music and stories, they’re never the heroes in history.”
Clooney’s acceptance speech comes just days after Venice Film Festival decided to scrap its annual jury press conference on Saturday before deciding to reinstate it on Sunday. These decisions came hot on the heels of more than 200 artists signing an open letter from the group Venice4Palestine appealing to “put Palestine in the spotlight of the Film Festival and bring the resistance of the Palestinian people to the center of public discourse.”
Multiple film festivals have been met with growing discussions around what responsibilities they have to address the politics of the day beyond the programming of art with political content. Rather than simply speaking on his own career, Clooney took the opportunity of his acceptance speech to directly address the rise of authoritarianism.
“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. Fear one another. But we know better than that, don’t we?” Clooney asked the crowd. “Because history does teach us a lesson. It teaches us something. The first people that authoritarians try to shut down are not politicians. They’re journalists who ask questions. They’re the artists who refuse simple answers. They’re the filmmakers, writers, actors … who insist that someone you have never met is deserving of your empathy.”
Clooney went on to talk about the power of art in providing connection, describing film in a similar light as Roger Ebert’s famous “empathy machine” commentary. As he accepted the European lifetime achievement award (not unlike his central character in last year’s “Jay Kelly”), Clooney acknowledged that “Movies don’t stop wars. They don’t lower inflation. They don’t fix elections,” before adding that “if we can still sit together in the dark and care about people that we have never met, I think maybe we’ll be okay.”
“There’s something extraordinary about this place. For 90 years, people have come here from countries that don’t agree on politics, don’t agree on religion. They certainly don’t agree on language, and yet here we all are in Venice, in this cathedral that I have had some of my most incredible moments in — and some questionable behavior. I think I wouldn’t be good friends with some of you here if it weren’t for some of that questionable behavior,” Clooney quipped, ever the charmer. “But here’s what I know, I’ve learned over all these years: Nobody laughs in a different language. Nobody cries in a different language. Parents worry the same. Kids dream the same. Love looks remarkably similar in language, which makes it hard to believe that we’re as different as we’re constantly being told.”
