Andrea Pallaoro’s Golden Lion contender The Echo Chamber, starring Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli and Susan Sarandon, earned a eight-minute ovation as it world premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday evening.
The film is based on Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay which he was fine-tuning prior to his death in Rome in 2018.
Marinelli stars as a talented music producer with a history of drug addiction, opposite Vikander as a seemingly gentle-hearted physiotherapist who comes to his rescue and Sarandon as a storied singing star who hires him to work on her comeback album.
The film received a warm response with Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon sharing a long hug as the lights went up.
The production is led by Rome-based Indigo Film’s Nicola Giuliano who acquired the rights to the screenplay and attached Pallaoro to the project.
Reworking the screenplay with Bertolucci’s original co-writers Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, it marked a departure Venice regular Pallaoro, who wrote the screenplays for his three features to date: Medeas, Hannah and Monica.
At the press conference for the film earlier in the day, Sarandon, who has said Hollywood roles have dried up for as a result of her pro-Palestinian stance, thanked Pallaoro for having the courage to cast her in the project.
“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 said in response to a question from Deadline about whether she envisaged working with the studios in the future.
