Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Nobel-winning writer Annie Ernaux, actor Guy Pearce and a host of Italian and international artists have signed an open letter to the Venice Biennale and the Venice Film Festival calling on the event to take “concrete action” against what they describe as a genocide against the Palestinian people.

The appeal under the Venice4Palestine banner follows a similar open letter to the Venice film festival a year ago that has apparently yielded no tangible results for Gaza. “A new normality… has emerged—thanks in part to a false ceasefire. Israel has not only not stopped, but has continued its atrocities, expanding its firepower toward the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. For the Palestinian people, nothing has changed, and tears are not enough to absolve us: rather, they are evidence that we are unable to draw sufficiently on our collective power of action,” the latest open letter states.

The appeal also calls on Venice to “raise the Palestinian flag for the entire duration of the festival alongside all the other flags representing the films present in the official selection, as is standard practice and as already acknowledged by the festival’s official information sources.”

The 2026 signatories include directors Isabel Coixet, Céline Sciamma and Matteo Garrone, Palestinian directors  Arab Nasser and Tarzan Nasser, French-Israeli director Eyan Sivan.

Venice4Palestine representatives will be part of a Sept. 8 panel at Venice, entitled Yet Gaza Continues to Burn, on the Lido.

The full open letter and a full list of signatories follows.

Yet Gaza Continues to Burn

A year has pass…

A year ago, thousands of people joined the Venice4Palestine call to put Palestine in the spotlight at the Venice Film Festival and bring the resistance of the Palestinian people to the center of public discourse: finally, we were talking openly about genocide instead of war . While we were calling on the Biennale and the Venice Film Festival to take a clear stance and on film workers to express their solidarity, the screening of Sawt Hind Rajab ( The Voice of Hind Rajab ), during the festival, suddenly seemed to take on those demands, generating collective emotion and indignation. In the days and weeks that followed, as part of that stream of popular consciousness that had been created, millions of us took to the streets and went to sea in solidarity with the Palestinian people. A wave of participation gave us hope that together we could help stop the genocide.

A new normality, however, has emerged—thanks in part to a false ceasefire.
Israel has not only not stopped, but has continued its atrocities, expanding its firepower toward the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. For the Palestinian people, nothing has changed, and tears are not enough to absolve us: rather, they are evidence that we are unable to draw sufficiently on our collective power of action. Palestine reminds us that “another world is possible.” Twenty-five years ago, we experienced the collective trauma of Genoa 2001. We witnessed one of the most serious suspensions of democracy. The expressions of dissent were silenced with unspeakable violence. A slaughterhouse deliberately exposed as a demonstration, to dictate to the collective memory a precise order for the future: remember the blood and forget the ideas that a community had expressed to change the world.

We find this enormous laboratory of repression increasingly applied today in Italy and in many other states that claim to be democratic. The oppressive bullying of our governments, the repressive actions of their armed forces, the liberticidal laws, the mystifying narratives spread by complacent media represent a wall where the demands for justice, equity, and reciprocity are shattered. However tragic and bitter it may seem, however, the Palestinian resistance has reconnected us with the idea that “another world is possible.” The Palestinian people continue to resist and create, to narrate the present reality at the risk of their own lives, to preserve memory and nurture the possibility of a different and more just tomorrow: we have a duty to embrace and practice this teaching. The militarized cities and the unconstitutional laws that criminalize dissent betray the fear of a dehumanizing system faced with the strength of a conscious and determined community. We must not allow these reprisals to paralyze and divide us. The increased repression is proof that our actions are having an impact. We must therefore continue to persist.

Dockworkers are blocking weapons shipments, asserting the right to conscientious objection as a means of protection from unjustified charges and disciplinary action. At the Venice Art Biennale, thanks in part to the action of ANGA (Art Not Genocide Alliance), the international jury resigned en masse, and workers protested the opening of the Israeli pavilion, striking for the first time in the institution’s history. In international waters, the Global Sumud Flotilla challenged the Israeli siege, transforming solidarity into concrete action, revealing the true face of a criminal state. These are all struggles moving in the same direction: refusing to be a cog in the wheel of normalization. As workers in the film, audiovisual, and cultural sectors, we believe it is time to organize ourselves in collective action to have a concrete impact on the mechanisms of complicity and normalization.

1- Trace the supply chain, break the complicity

Cinema, like many other sectors of art and culture, relies on supply chains: funding, co-productions, distribution agreements, sales, festivals and events, partnerships with festivals and sponsors. Each of these steps can contribute to the normalization of ongoing barbarism or, on the contrary, oppose and halt it. It is therefore necessary to demand transparency at every stage of the supply chain, suspending
all agreements with entities and institutions linked to the Israeli government. The exceptional nature of the historical moment we live in requires us to isolate Israel diplomatically,
culturally, and economically. The boycott, as a tool to pressure institutions
and as a form of resistance (responding to the call launched in 2005 by
Palestinian civil society through PACBI and BDS*), does not target identity as
such but rather acts precisely on the mechanisms of complicity. This will continue until the
Israeli government complies with international law and accepts at least the three
main conditions expressed in the original BDS call:

– end the occupation and colonization of Palestine;
– recognize the fundamental rights of Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel;
– respect the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as stipulated
in UN Resolution 194.

2- From awareness to shared practice

We call on all stakeholders and associations in the film, information, and culture sectors to unite to build a protective structure that will defend workers in the sector from the professional risks of a concrete commitment against genocide, thus breaking the employment blackmail that currently discourages disobedience. Out of the need for joint action, we have developed, together with a legal team, a first instrument that allows every film worker to dissociate themselves from complicity in the crimes that Israel continues to commit with impunity.
This document combines the Italian Constitution, international law, and copyright law, in response to the recent controversy surrounding the Italian film retrospective in Israel and the sense of impotence expressed by the authors involved regarding the management and exploitation of their works and their image.

3- Palestine is not forgotten

To honor the presence of the two Palestinian films, Al Mowaten Osama by Ahmed Hassouna and Hiwar ma’ albahr by Muayad Alayan, we ask the Festival to also raise the Palestinian flag for the entire duration of the festival alongside all the other flags representing the films present in the official selection, as is standard practice and as already acknowledged by the Festival’s official information sources. Last year, we expressed the need to highlight the voices of Palestinian artists during the opening and closing ceremonies of the Exhibition. This request was accepted by the Biennale presidency and the Exhibition’s artistic direction, not by giving space to Palestinian voices, but by inviting those who worked in Palestine and witnessed what was happening. The recent statements of Cardinal Pizzaballa, who already spoke on stage at the Exhibition a year ago, lead us to ask, today with even greater urgency, to renew that testimony on the same occasion, giving voice to those who resist alongside the Palestinian people and continue to speak out about the incessant destruction that the European Union and its member states still have no intention of countering.

Finally, we urge all film and culture workers to continue to bring Palestine to the spotlight of the Festival and to the center of public conversation, using every means at their disposal. We invite everyone to the panel “Yet Gaza Continues to Burn,” which we will hold on Tuesday, September 8, at 5:30 p.m. at the Casa degli Autori, Via Pietro Buratti 1, Lido di Venezia . We will be guests of the Venice Days, where we will be present with our legal team to illustrate the document we are working on and to discuss it with activists from PACBI, BDS, the Global Sumud Flotilla, CALP USB, ANGA, CRED, Artisti #NoBavaglio, and the Gaza International Festival for Women’s Cinema, to build new paths for concrete action together.

Annie Ernaux – Nobel Prize-winning writer (France)
Roger Waters – musician (United Kingdom)
Saleh Bakri – actor (Palestine)
Yanis Varoufakis – economist and professor, former minister (Greece)
Matteo Garrone – director (Italy)
Fabrizio Gifuni – actor and theatre director (Italy)
Anna Foglietta – actress and director (Italy)
Laura Morante – actress and director (Italy)
Luigi Lo Cascio – actor (Italy)
Sergio Rubini – actor and director (Italy)
Greta Scarano – actress, director, godmother of the 83rd Venice Film Festival (Italy)
Moni Ovadia – actor, author, singer-songwriter (Italy)
Tomaso Montanari – art historian, essayist, rector at the University for Foreigners of Siena (Italy)
Ascanio Celestini – actor, director and playwright (Italy)
Guy Pearce – actor (United Kingdom)
Jasmine Trinca – actress (Italy)
Céline Sciamma – director, screenwriter (France)
Andrea Occhipinti – producer and distributor (Italy)
Lino Musella – actor, director (Italy)
Tecla Insolia – actress (Italy)
Nan Goldin – artist, photographer and activist (USA)
Isabel Coixet – director and screenwriter (Spain)
Paul Laverty – screenwriter (UK)
Adèle Haenel – actress, author (France)
Teona Strugar Mitevska – filmmaker (North Macedonia)
Benedikt Erlingsson – director, screenwriter (Iceland)
Igor Bezinović director (Croatia)
Sonia Bergamasco – actress and director (Italy)
Alessio Boni – actor and theatre director (Italy)
Antonietta De Lillo – director (Italy)
Pino Arlacchi – sociologist – former UN undersecretary (Italy)
Silvia Scola – author and screenwriter (Italy)
Arab Nasser – director (Palestine)
Tarzan Nasser – director (Palestine)
Eyal Sivan – filmmaker (Israel – France)
Motaz Malhees, actor (Palestine)
Dalia Ismail – journalist (Palestine)
Indya Moore – actress and activist (USA)
Paola Caridi – essayist and journalist (Italy)
Raffaele Oriani – journalist, writer (Italy)
Giacomo Durzi – screenwriter (Italy)
Giulia Minoli – writer and activist una nessuna centomila (Italy)
Monica Maurer – director (Italy)
Vincenzo Vita – president of Aamod (Italy)
Stefania Brai – journalist (Italy)
Insaf Rezagui – associate researcher at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Algeria-France)
Sbeih Sbeih – sociologist (Palestine-France)
Paolo Briguglia – actor (Italy)
Claudio Noce – director (Italy)
Manuela Mandracchia – actress (Italy)
Paola Freddi – editor (Italy)
Sara Petraglia – director (Italy)
Stefano Sardo – producer, director and screenwriter (Italy)
Francesca Fornario – journalist (Italy)
Fausto Paravidino – actor, playwright (Italy)
Pietro Sermonti – actor (Italy)
Maria Grazia Calandrone – writer (Italy)
Paola Minaccioni – actress (Italy)
Dalal Suleiman – actress (Italy)
Veronica Pivetti – actress (Italy)
Michela Occhipinti – director (Italy)
Céline Salette – actress, director (France)
Marco Simon Puccioni – director (Italy)
Anna Di Francisca – director (Italy)
Paolo Spina – producer (Italy)
Christian Carmosino Mereu – director (Italy)
Mariano Lamberti – director (Italy)
Daniela Giordano – actress (Italy)
Marco Bonini – actor (Italy)
Daniela Poggi – actress (Italy)
Gabriella Gallozzi – editor of Bookciak Magazine (Italy)
Carmine Amoroso – director and screenwriter (Italy)
Daniele Coluccini – director and producer (Italy)
Alessio Maria Federici – director (Italy)
Federico Greco – filmmaker (Italy)
Emanuele Gerosa – director (Italy)
Ivan Gergolet – director (Italy)
Raquel Schefer – programmer, filmmaker and researcher (Portugal)
Agata Iacono – sociologist, anthropologist, journalist (Italy)
Gabriele Guzzi – university professor and president of L’Indispensabile (Italy)
Paolo Cornetti – editor of La Fionda (Italy)
Nello Preterossi – professor of Philosophy of Law (Italy)
Alessandro Somma – professor of Comparative Law (Italy)
Giulio Di Donato – editor-in-chief of La fionda (Italy)
Thomas Fazi – journalist and essayist (Italy)
Francesco Bolo Rossini – actor (Italy)
Deborah Zuin – actress (Italy)
Stefano Scherini – actor (Italy)
Sonia Barbadoro – actress (Italy)
Giorgio Lupano – actor (Italy)
Francesca Ciocchetti – actress (Italy)
Laura Nardi – actress (Italy)
Marina Remi – actress (Italy)
Cristian Giammarini – actor (Italy)
Aurora Palandrani – director Premio Zavattini (Italy)
Benedetta Buccellato – actress (Italy)
Diego De Santis – sound engineer (Italy)
Nan van Houte – Cultural Boycott Israel (Netherlands / Belgium)
Sruti Bala – Cultural Boycott Israel (Netherlands / Belgium)
Giovanna Scardoni – playwright and theatre director (Italy)
Tony Allotta – performer and mediator (Italy)
Milena Fiore – technical manager and editor Aamod (Italy)
Marco Dentici – director and set designer (Italy)
Alia Shawkat – actress (USA)
Ezzadeen Shalh – president Gaza International Festival for Women’s cinema (Palestine)
Marco Pozzi – director (Italy)
Cristina Pasqua – writer (Italy)
Dror Warschawski – researcher Sorbonne Université (France)
Giovanni Greco – author and director (Italy)
Mirco Rocchi – set designer (Italy)
Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg – director (Italy)
Giovanni Alfieri – actor (Italy)
Federica Alderighi – producer (Italy)
Maria Teresa De Vito – director (Italy)
Maud Wyler – actress (France)
Hervé Loichemol – director (France)
Livia Bonifazi – actress (Italy)
Franco Angeli – director (Italy)
Khalil Cherti – director (France)
Claudio Casazza – director (Italy)
Beppe Leonetti – editor (Italy)
Fabiomassimo Lozzi – director and screenwriter (Italy)
Mazzino Montinari – festival selector and critic (Italy)
Valentina Pellitteri – filmmaker (Italy)
Patrizia Roletti – producer (Italy)
Marisella Rossetti- festival (Belgium)
Silvia Pegah Scaglione – actress and theatre director (Italy)
Giorgia Villa – editor (Italy)

The queen of creating luxury experiences, Lisa Vanderpump, is heading to Salzburg, Austria, as Hulu renews Vanderpump Villa for a fourth season.

Vanderpump will be joined by House of Stassi star Stassi Schroeder once again, with cast and guests for Season 4 being revealed at a later date.

Other locations where the series, produced by Bunim/Murray Productions, has filmed include Chateau Rosabelle in France (Season 1), Castello Rosato in Italy (Season 2), and Tryingham Hall in England (Season 3).

Vanderpump Villa premiered in 2023 and follows the personal lives of Vanderpump’s staff as they create experiences for guests staying in one of these luxurious estates.

The most recent season welcomed guests including Love Island UK‘s Ekin-su, Charity Lawson and Dotun Olubeko from Bachelor Nation, along with the return of Schroeder and her family.

Previous seasons have also included cast members from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, whose shenanigans on Vanderpump Villa had real-life consequences and spilled over into their show. This synergy has helped fuel the Huluverse, where reality TV personalities are featured on other unscripted shows produced by the streamer.

Season three of Vanderpump Villa premiered with all ten episodes on April 16, 2026, followed by a reunion special on April 30, 2026. Cast members from Season 3 include Vanderpump, her husband Ken Todd, Anthoniy Bar, Gabriella Sannon, Hannah Fouch, Marciano Brunette, Hagen Bach, Dominic DeAngelis, Alyssa Johnston, Sher Suárez, and Sam Terry, among others.

Lisa Vanderpump executive produces Vanderpump Villa under her Villa Rosa production banner. Julie Pizzi, Erica Ross, Peter Geist, and Ian Gelfand also executive produce.

In 1980, Frank Sinatra returned to the big screen for the first time in 10 years in “The First Deadly Sin,” and the result was not only Ol’ Blue Eyes’ best performance, but a fascinating curiosity that ended one cycle of films and looked forward to another.

A grim meditation on aging and mortality masquerading as a serial killer thriller, it’s one of the bleakest and most idiosyncratic movies of Sinatra’s career — which is really saying something when you’re talking about the guy who starred in “Some Came Running,” “The Man with the Golden Arm,” and “The Manchurian Candidate.”

In “The First Deadly Sin,” which was adapted by ace screenwriter Mann Rubin (“The Best of Everything”) from a popular crime novel by Lawrence Sanders, Sinatra plays world-weary NYPD detective Edward Delaney, a cop just a few weeks from retirement whose wife (Faye Dunaway) lies dying in the hospital. When Delaney begins investigating the murder of a man killed in the street with a hammer, he quickly realizes the homicide is the work of a serial killer. But the murders have taken place in different boroughs, and breakdowns in interdepartmental communications have kept any from seeing obvious connections.

Unable to convince anyone to see what he sees — or, worse, to care about it — Delaney goes rogue and pursues the killer without going through proper channels or procuring the necessary warrants, culminating in an act of vigilante justice that wouldn’t seem out of place in a movie starring Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson. Yet if the story of “First Deadly Sin” sounds like something out of “Dirty Harry” or “10 to Midnight,” the execution — both in terms of Brian G. Hutton’s leisurely direction and Sinatra’s beleaguered performance — makes it singular, less an example of the post-“Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish” wave of vigilante thrillers than a last gasp of commentary on them before the genre would shift into a different register.

The key to the film is Sinatra’s sense of excruciating resignation. Although he’s battling both criminals and a failed system in the same way as Dirty Harry Callahan or Bronson’s Paul Kersey in “Death Wish,” there’s no fire in his pursuit; until the film’s climax, the closest he comes to rage or violence is threatening to throttle his wife’s incompetent doctor. Delaney follows leads with as much passion as one would check items off a grocery list, and there’s a curious lack of propulsion to Rubin’s screenplay.

Scenes don’t seem to lead into each other as much as they exist independently as studies in stasis — no one in this movie ever seems to really be going anywhere or moving forward with their lives (Faye Dunaway spends the entire movie in a bed that she never leaves). This is not a criticism; what makes “The First Deadly Sin” compelling is the palpable sense of loss it conveys.

When Clint Eastwood tosses his badge to the ground at the end of “Dirty Harry,” it’s an empty gesture — we know he doesn’t really mean it, and that he’ll be back for the sequels. Sinatra’s sense of hopelessness is relentless — there’s no meaning in his pursuit of the killer. No one really seems to care if Delaney catches the psycho or not, and if he doesn’t it won’t make that big a difference on the world outside of the handful of victims the killer takes his hammer to.

The only meaning to be found in Delaney’s mission comes in its contrast to what’s happening in the hospital with his wife. Structurally, “The First Deadly Sin” is rigorous in its parallel attentions to the murder investigations and Delaney’s visits to his dying spouse, and the effect is to connect the two stories on a subliminal level. Delaney can’t save his wife, but maybe he can save someone else by catching the killer; in the end, however, achieving the latter does nothing to alleviate the anguish of the former, and Delaney ends the movie alone and purposeless.

It’s a depressing finale that the movie more than prepares us for, with scene after sad scene in which Delaney barely seems to have the energy to walk from one side of the room to the other, let alone hunt down a killer. In one extended sequence, Delaney just wanders his lonely apartment, the ghost of his wife already haunting the place. She’s not dead yet, but she might as well be, as Delaney ponders what his life looks like without her and realizes his own life is just as finished as hers.

None of this is explicitly stated; it’s conveyed by Rubin and Hutton’s carefully constructed parallel structure and by Sinatra’s body language and gestures. It would be an astonishing performance for any actor, but coming from Sinatra it’s positively mind-blowing. Sinatra had gone dark before, but he rarely fully lost his Rat Pack swagger; there was usually a confidence to his performances, even in downers like “Some Came Running.”

In “The First Deadly Sin” there’s no ego and no mask — Sinatra lets us see every wrinkle and walks around like he’s lugging bowling balls in his pockets, with the wounds of age all the more apparent given the contrast between the actor’s appearance here and when he had last appeared in a movie 10 years earlier.

The conceit of a cop working a big case on the eve of his retirement would become a genre movie cliché in later films like “Falling Down” and “Se7en,” but in those movies there’s usually some sense that the final job is reminding the lead detective of why they do what they do — often, they end up deciding not to retire after all. In “The First Deadly Sin,” it’s unthinkable that Delaney would go back to work after the final scene; really, it’s unthinkable that he will ever even leave his apartment.

The film’s power derives from the fact that it belongs to a genre so at odds with its effects; it marks, in its way the end of the cycle of 1970s vigilante thrillers that began with “Dirty Harry,” “Walking Tall,” and “Death Wish.” There would be vigilante movies after “The First Deadly Sin,” of course, but the genre morphed into something different with the likes of “Ms. 45” and “10 to Midnight,” something more lurid and expressionistic. (If you want to track the increasing stylization of the genre, you can do it simply by comparing the relatively “realistic” “Death Wish” with its heightened sequels.)

“The First Deadly Sin” is a kind of pivot point between the two eras, but it belongs to neither. It’s too restrained to fit in with later vigilante movies and particularly later serial killer films; as opposed to something like “Se7en,” with which it shares many superficial similarities, “The First Deadly Sin” spends almost zero time on the actual serial killer’s motivations or even his crimes — there’s almost zero onscreen violence in the movie. And it lacks the righteous rage of a 1970s vigilante film; Delaney isn’t mad, he’s just tired and indifferent. The only wisdom age has brought him is that there’s nothing he can really do to stave off the infinite string of losses life hands you.

It’s a downer of a message for a mainstream movie, and “The First Deadly Sin,” unsurprisingly, was not a hit in its time. In spite of deservedly positive reviews for Sinatra’s performance (if not the movie as a whole), it also didn’t really find an audience on home video or television. Now, however, the boutique physical media label Vinegar Syndrome has given “The First Deadly Sin” the treatment it always deserved, via a Blu-ray featuring a new restoration and filled with terrific extra features.

The two audio commentaries, by film scholars Travis Woods and Amanda Reyes, are particularly noteworthy — they’re both packed with insight and information that add enormously to one’s appreciation of the film. (They also point out blink-and-you’ll-miss-them key moments like the one where a young Bruce Willis passes by onscreen as an extra, a fascinating fact given that “Die Hard” is technically a sequel to the 1968 Sinatra vehicle “The Detective.”) Vinegar Syndrome has always been one of the best labels out there when it comes to unearthing hidden gems; this is one of their best releases to date.

The special edition Blu-ray of “The First Deadly Sin” is now available from Vinegar Syndrome.