Is the high amount of stars and American films still representing the Festivals’ Independence or is the festival losing weight under the pressure of the Studio’s? This year there’s an exceptional big amount of stars passing the red carpet in Venice and it makes the hundreds of hungry fans wait for hours each day to catch a glimpse of their cinema profits like Jude Law, George Clooney, Richard Gere, Bill Murray, Diane Kruger. However, when we look at all the hype created around the stars we ask ourselves, is this the Independent Film Festival La Biennale? Is this the place where independent films stand out against the day-to-day packed cinemas filled with big budget Hollywood Studio films?

To a big extend, the answer is yes. There has been a new trend in the last couple of years where actors ‘fill up their creditcards with movies like Ocean Thirteen, to be able to spend it all on Independent films like Michael Clayton’, says George Clooney. As one of the examples of the Independent producers list from Hollywood, Clooney created a company called Section Eight together with Steven Soderbergh to produce, and sometimes act and sometimes direct, several independent movies. ‘Our system was the following: we put a limit to the amount of years we would have this company, being six, from 2001 to 2007. My intention is not to run a company, my intention is to make an amount of independent movies,  so we gave the company a definite in time., We wanted to use the money we made through bigger films to support the little ones. And now I’ve founded another company and I’m doing it again.’ (The new created company Smoke House.) More and more Hollywood star actors are being seen in smaller independent movies nowadays and the actors are becoming more aware of the power movies have.

Cloony states: ‘Americans make mistakes, but they’re  good in correcting it. Cinema is one way to do this.’..‘With films like Michael Clayton we try to wake people up, make them aware of the racial, political and other frustrating situations we are in nowadays.’

Also Richard Shephard, the director of The Hunting Party starring Richard Gere, Terence Howard and Diane Kruger, set in Bosnia, showing Out of Competition here in Venice, informed the press during his conference that: ‘We can complain about the studio system, however, if it didn’t exist, I couldn’t have these great actors to work for me.’ He explains that the studio buys the freedom of choice for the actors. He used the names of the stars to get money for his film and he also knows that it will be sold worldwide with a cast like this. Without the actors it would have been far more difficult, if not impossible. The largest amount of the rest of the crew came from Bosnia and have always worked in the independent industry.

Maybe the time has come that Hollywood provides something to the Independent industry. Something extra in the form of money and we all know that money ‘buys’ independence.

Spazio “Pagoda”, Lido di Venezia, 31/08/2007

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