VENICE - Julia Roberts is due to walk the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival for the first time after stepping into a new role as a college professor grappling with tense US campus politics.
The "Pretty Woman" star will attend the world premiere of "After the Hunt", a cancel culture psychological drama from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, a Venice regular, which is playing out of competition.
In the film, Roberts plays a professor at an elite American university who is haunted by a secret from her past after a colleague is accused of sexual assault by a student.
Guadagnino -- the director of "Call Me By Your Name" which helped send Timothee Chalamet to stardom -- was in the main competition at Venice last year with "Queer," an adaptation of the William Burroughs novel of the same name.
Dealing with Gen Z culture and the generational divide between students and professors, the new Amazon-produced film has overtones of Todd Field's 2022 drama "Tar", which handed Cate Blanchett a best actress award at Venice.
"Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable," says Roberts' character in the film to a student.
Guadagnino told Vanity Fair this week that he found "upsetting" the idea of self-censorship on university campuses.
"The idea that something cannot be said, an idea cannot be used, a reference cannot be brought to light because there is a sort of unspoken impossibility of doing so and a self-censorship -- it’s so upsetting to me," Guadagnino told the magazine.