THE TERMINAL, a film by Steven SPIELBERG (with Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride, Diego Luna) will open the 61st edition of the Venice festival under new management by Marco Mueller.An impressive crowd is expected to attend the Lido.

The Terminal tells the story of Viktor Navorsky, a visitor to New York from Eastern Europe, whose homeland erupts in a violent coup while he is on the plane en route to America. Stranded at Kennedy Airport with a passport from nowhere, he is unauthorised to actually enter the United States and must improvise his days and nights in the terminal's international transit lounge until the war at home is over.

As the weeks and months stretch on, Viktor finds the compressed universe of the terminal to be a richly complex world of absurdity, generosity, ambition, amusement, status, serendipity and even romance with a beautiful flight assistant named Amelia. But Viktor has long worn out his welcome with airport official Frank Dixon, who considers him a bureaucratic glitch, a problem he wants desperately to erase.

«The great experiment of the melting pot may no longer exist in America, but I believe that terminals in international airports are where the melting pot can be found today. When people go to an international terminal, they meet the world right there. And, if they make the extra effort, they can speak to the world and communicate with people from different faiths, nationalities, cultures and colours. Terminals are rainbows and very positive examples of how the world can get along – especially if it’s a snowy day and the flights are delayed and they’re forced to spend eight hours with each other» --Steven Spielberg