Roos Abels Wanders Venice by Laura Sciacovelli for ELLE Italia September 12, 2020

Roos Abels Wanders Venice by Laura Sciacovelli for ELLE Italia September 12, 2020

Model Roos Abels wears ‘60s-inspired silhouettes from Celine, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton and more, styled by Monica Curetti for ‘Diva in Incognito’. Photographer Laura Sciacovelli captures the solitary, emotional mood in Venice for ELLE Italia’s September 12, 2020 issue.

The 77th Venice Film Festival opened in the magical city Wednesday night, the first post-lockdown festival to happen and at a time when fears are intense that a second wave of COVID-19 is entering Europe.

The flooding in Venice has subsided at this moment, as a new dialogue around the city (one of my favorite places on earth) emerges. Some climate change scholars and ethicists argue that perhaps places like Venice would serve a larger social purpose by allowing them to collapse naturally — as an example of what happens to human history and treasured heritage sites when human activity and overabundance destroys them.

Wakanda Forever

This was not the message in Venice Wednesday night when Venice Film Festival jury president Cate Blanchett presented Tilda Swinton with a Golden Lion for career achievement. The Hollywood Reporter writes:

The audience, starved of a film festival experience for months, ate it up. To see a film in Venice, said Swinton, is "pure joy." She thanked the festival for showing the resilience of cinema and reminding everyone that "we can continue to rely on the great, elastic, wide, wild, bouncy, boundary-less and perpetually inclusive state of cinema."

The Oscar-winner closed with a tribute to the Black Panther himself, Chadwick Boseman: "Wakanda Forever. Nothing but love,” she said, to a standing ovation.