The Venice Film Festival has opened with the premiere of the much talked about Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading.”

Although in town to promote his latest film, fresh father Brad Pitt was surprisingly awarded on Wednesday with the Best Actor trophy he won last year for his role in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

“I guess you forgot something here years ago,” said the mistress of ceremonies during the opening ceremony of the 65^th Venice International Film Festival.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Brad Pitt said, accepting the engraved gold cup. “It was an honor to receive this last year, and it’s an honor to receive it this year. Thank you very much.”

“Burn After Reading,” starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, as well as Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton, is playing out of competition for the popular Golden Lion this year, which will be awarded on the festival’s closing night, on September 6.

This year, 21 productions are competing for the prize, including entries from Ethiopia, Turkey, Algeria, plus a Brazilian-Chinese film.

Before the screening of their highly anticipated movie, Brad Pitt and George Clooney kindly posed for pictures and signed autograph books for their fans.

The Joel and Ethan Coen black comedy “Burn After Reading” portrays John Malkovich as Osbourne Cox, a CIA analyst who quits his job after being reduced in rank due to his drinking problem. His wife, Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), intending to divorce Osbourne, copies all of her husband’s files on his computer, including his still in progress memoirs. Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) gets his hands on the disk and plans to blackmail the ex-CIA employee.

George Clooney is CIA agent Harry Pfarrer who is delegated to find the disk, but things get even more troublesome because he is sleeping with Osbourne Cox’s wife.

This year’s festival is dedicated to Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine who died last month at the age of 82.