VENICE — Andrea Pallaoro’s Golden Lion contender The Echo Chamber earned an eight-minute standing ovation at its world premiere Sunday evening at the Venice Film Festival, Deadline reported, as co-star Susan Sarandon said Hollywood roles are still being taken away from her over her pro-Palestinian stance.

The film adapts Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay, which he was refining before his 2018 death. Luca Marinelli plays a music producer with a drug history opposite Alicia Vikander as a physiotherapist who tries to rescue him, with Sarandon as a storied singer hiring him for a comeback album. Rome’s Indigo Film (Nicola Giuliano) leads production; Pallaoro reworked the script with Bertolucci’s original co-writers Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi.

Deadline’s video of the Sala reaction showed Vikander and Sarandon hugging as the lights came up after the long ovation.

“That’s the power structure”

At the day’s press conference, Sarandon thanked Pallaoro for casting her and said studios and agencies still freeze her out. “I’ve still had movies taken away recently because there are agencies that are telling people not to hire me still. But that’s the power structure. I think within the people, certainly internationally, I feel welcome,” she told Deadline when asked about future studio work.

Whatever one thinks of Sarandon’s politics, the mechanism she describes is familiar: informal industry blacklists enforced by talent agencies and financiers, not a statute or a jury. Concentrated gatekeepers deciding who may work is a free-speech and labor story as much as a culture-war one — and Venice’s warm reception underlines how differently the same artist can be treated outside those U.S. gatekeeping networks.

The Echo Chamber is seeking U.S. distribution.

Sources