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Danny Glover movies get $20M in funding from Venezuela

Last Updated: Saturday, May 19, 2007 | 11:14 AM ET

The Venezuelan government has approved $20 million US in financing to back two films by American actor Danny Glover, a supporter of President Hugo Chavez.

The funds will go towards The General and His Labyrinth — chronicling the life of South American liberator Simon Bolivar and based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez — and Toussaint, about Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture.

Neither Glover nor Chavez were available for comment.

The 60-year-old actor, perhaps best known as playing Mel Gibson's sidekick in the Lethal Weapon movies, has met with Chavez several times and even appeared on his television and radio talk show, Hello, President.

Glover is an activist who recently was in the anti-globalization movie Bamako, which he executive produced, and has blamed the World Bank for perpetuating poverty in the developing world to the benefit of industrialized nations.

Chavez announced in early May he was pulling his country out of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

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"I'm a storyteller," Glover told the Philadelphia Enquirer in April. "I want the stories that I try to tell to move people, to have them understand what is often happening in the world."

The actor also serves as an ambassador for UN programs and is chair of the Transafrica Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to unite Africans worldwide.

"I'm a child of the civil rights movement. …I'm blown away by [Martin Luther King], who was in 1955 at the Montgomery bus boycott, and who he turned out to be 13 years later," said Glover. "And that evolution, that kind of evolution of thought, political thought, I think, is essential."