Susan Sarandon To Receive Rome Film Festival Honour

The actress will collect the award at Alice in the City while her new film, Zach Woods' directorial debut The Accompanist, makes its international premiere there.

Susan Sarandon is headed to Rome. Variety reported on Monday that the actress will be honoured by Alice in the City, the independently run sidebar of the Rome Film Festival that focuses on films for children and young audiences, with its Womenlands Excellence Award.

The trip does double duty. Sarandon is also bringing "The Accompanist," the feature directorial debut of "Silicon Valley" actor Zach Woods, for its international launch at the festival. She plays Sylvia in the film, a foster parent taking in an eight-year-old named Emily for the first time, described as chain-smoking and sharp-tongued in the source material. The indie dramedy first showed at Tribeca in June, where it landed well.

The Womenlands award goes to women, Italian or international, who've made a mark across culture, entertainment and activism. Sarandon joins a list that includes Paz Vega, Nastassja Kinski and Italy's own Laura Luchetti as past recipients.

In its statement, the festival went long on her filmography. "From 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' to 'The Hunger,' from 'The Witches of Eastwick' to 'Thelma & Louise,' to 'Dead Man Walking,' Sarandon has spanned decades of cinema, building a gallery of female characters that cannot be reduced to a single model," the statement read, calling her characters women who question identity, desire, power, rules and freedom.

But the citation wasn't just about the roles. The festival pointed to something else: her refusal to bend to how Hollywood usually runs things, tying her career choices to a consistency of personal conviction that's held up across five decades.

That framing lands differently given what Sarandon has been saying lately. Just weeks before the Rome news broke, she was at Venice with Andrea Pallaoro's "The Echo Chamber" and told reporters there that she still feels frozen out by the industry over her vocal support for Palestine. It's her own account, not an independently verified claim, and Variety's report doesn't say more on it beyond that Venice remark. Worth flagging that this is Sarandon's characterisation of her standing in the industry, not a settled fact about who is or isn't hiring her.

Rome hasn't put out a full lineup yet, so where "The Accompanist" sits on the festival calendar, and whether Sarandon does a press day alongside Woods, is still unclear. The Rome Film Festival typically runs in mid-October, and an award ceremony date for the Womenlands honour hasn't been announced.

For now, what's confirmed is the shape of the trip: a career award, a foreign premiere, and an actress who's spent this festival season using every stage she's on to talk about more than just the film she's there to sell.