Clooney and Pitt To Stand For Charity

VENICE, Italy - George Clooney and Brad Pitt appears as the notable delegates in this years Venice Film Festival to be held this week.

By Tuesday night they are to attend a fund raising event for their charity, Not On Our Watch. Then by Wednesday, a red carpet premiere of “Burn After Reading” which will officially open the 65th edition of the festival that will run until Sept. 6.

The said charity program, Not On Our Watch was launched last year by the stars - Clooney and Pitt and some of their “Ocean’s Thirteen” colleagues. It aims to help victims both of the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan and the cyclone in Myanmar. The charity currently has raised more than $7 million for this purpose, according to executive director Alex Wagner.

Despite their filming and family demands, nothing can keep them from heeding the call of stopping human rights abuses. Clooney will discuss the financial issues at the fundraising dinner on Venice’s Giudecca island, which will be attended by some 200 industry insiders and Italian VIPs, Wagner said.

The charity has contributed a big deal for life sakes. The $500,000 grant last March in kept air service to Darfur. “We sent out a press release one day saying we were on the verge of closing it down and the next day we had $500,000,” said Bettina Luescher, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program at UN headquarters in New York City. The money help kept 3,000 aid workers a month to the stricken region and fed 3.3 million people.

Clooney has spoken for several years about the crisis in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have been killed and about 2.5 million people were displaced in three years because of the war between African rebels and government troops allied with Arab militia known as the Janjaweed.