American actress Susan Sarandon is set to receive the Womanlands Award for Excellence at the Rome Film Festival, as she says she continues to be excluded from Hollywood productions because of her public pro-Palestinian views.
Alice in the City event to honour Sarandon
The Womanlands Award is given to women from Italy and elsewhere who have distinguished themselves in culture, entertainment and public activism. Previous recipients include actresses Paz Vega and Nastassja Kinski, as well as Italian director Laura Luchetti. Sarandon is also visiting the Italian capital to present the international premiere of The Accompanist, the first feature film directed by actor Zach Woods, known for his role in the series Silicon Valley.
In the film, she plays Sylvia, a sharp-tongued heavy smoker who enters the experience of caring for an eight-year-old adopted girl named Emily for the first time. The Accompanist began its festival run at the Tribeca Film Festival last June before moving on to Rome.
Sarandon’s appearance at the festival combines the presentation of her new work with the receipt of an award whose reasons for honouring her draw both on her extensive screen career and on her political and social choices away from it.
Sarandon’s female roles behind honour
The organisers of Alice in the City linked their choice of Sarandon to the collection of female characters she has portrayed over several decades, highlighting roles in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Hunger, followed by The Witches of Eastwick and Thelma & Louise, and culminating in Dead Man Walking. An event statement said these works had, over a long career, created a gallery of female characters that could not be confined to a single mould.
It added that the women Sarandon portrayed on screen confronted questions of identity, desire, power, rules and freedom, themes the organisers said had remained present in her film choices. The organisers did not limit the reasons for the honour to Sarandon’s roles, praising instead what they described as her ability to retain her independence from the Hollywood system.
They also pointed to her combining artistic choices with personal freedom and continuing to stand by her convictions despite the professional consequences. The announcement of the honour comes weeks after she appeared at the Venice Film Festival in The Echo Chamber, directed by Italian filmmaker Andrea Pallauro.
Pro-Palestinian views affect Sarandon’s career opportunities
Sarandon said during the festival, in September 2026, that her pro-Palestinian views continued to affect her career opportunities and that films had recently been taken away from her, while agencies, she said, continued to advise production companies not to hire her. Sarandon distinguished between the position of some organisations working in the film industry and what she described as a shift in public sentiment.
She said she felt more accepted outside Hollywood, despite the continuing repercussions she had faced within the American industry because of her views and statements. Sarandon’s political activism did not begin with her position on the war in Gaza; for decades, her name has been associated with public causes and campaigns, some of which sparked controversy in the United States.
Sarandon’s record of protest and political activism since 1993
At the 1993 Academy Awards ceremony, she used her appearance with Tim Robbins to present one of the awards as an opportunity to protest the detention of Haitian refugees with HIV at Guantanamo Bay. Sarandon later took part in causes including the Occupy Wall Street movement and opposed hydraulic fracturing used to extract oil and gas.
Before the start of the American war in Iraq, she was among a group of Hollywood stars who supported a declaration opposing the invasion of Iraq in December 2002, alongside Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen and others. Sarandon said her opposition to the war exposed her and members of her family to threats and verbal attacks.
She also criticised members of the Democratic Party who supported the war, naming Hillary Clinton and John Kerry among them, continuing to direct criticism at figures within the political movement whose candidates she had supported at other stages. Her activism extended to American elections, as she backed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primary elections in 2016.
After Hillary Clinton secured the party’s nomination, Sarandon refused to support her and voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in New York State. Sarandon explained that she chose to vote for Stein while aware that New York’s result would go to Clinton.
She linked her decision to economic issues and the condition of the working class, two of the main issues on which Sanders’s campaign focused during the contest for the Democratic nomination. Sarandon’s pro-Palestinian views also predated the war that began in October 2023. In an interview published in 2014, she discussed the criticism she faced after publishing United Nations figures on children killed during Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
After the war broke out in 2023, Sarandon took part in pro-Palestinian rallies in the United States. Statements she made during those protests led talent agency UTA to end its relationship with her, before she confirmed at the 2026 Venice Film Festival that the impact of those positions on her work had not ended.
The Rome honour places the relationship between Sarandon’s artistic work and her public activism at the heart of the reasons for the award.
Her career has been accompanied by positions that began with the issue of Haitian refugees and included opposition to the Iraq war, support for Sanders and solidarity with Palestinians, alongside film roles presenting female characters outside traditional moulds, while her public positions prompted both support and criticism in the United States.
