Lévy directed the widely panned 1997 romance film "Day and Night". It is considered by critics the worst film of 1997 along with "Batman & Robin". The movie received a 3.5 million francs public subsidy through the "Commission des avances sur recettes", which at the time was chaired by Lévy. In 2007, Italian conceptual artist, Francesco Vezzoli, created two commercials for an imaginary U.S. presidential campaign, in which he had actress Sharon Stone running against Bernard-Henri Lévy. His project entitled "Democrazy," was shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Bernard Henri Lévy is a favorite victim of pie thrower Noël Godin. In September 2008, Lévy toured the United States to promote his book "". In 2006, Lévy joined the British debate over Muslim women's veils by suggesting to "The Jewish Chronicle" that wearing a veil had the effect of dehumanizing the wearer by hiding her face – and said, alluding to a passage by Emmanuel Levinas, that "the veil is an invitation to rape". On 24 June 2009, Lévy posted a video on Dailymotion in support of the Iranian protesters who were being repressed after the contested elections. He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the "La Règle du Jeu" ("The Rule of the Game") magazine. He writes a weekly column in the magazine "Le Point" and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte. Through the 2000s, Lévy argued that the world must pay more attention to the crisis in Darfur. In "Left in Dark Times", he argued that the Darfur genocide was not a palatable issue for modern leftists because it did not provide a platform for the anti-American views with which he says leftist thought has become suffused. In January 2010, he publicly defended Popes Pius XII and Benedict XVI against political attacks directed against them from within the Jewish community. At the opening of the "Democracy and its Challenges" conference in Tel Aviv (May 2010) Lévy gave a very high estimation of the Israel Defense Forces, saying "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy." Lévy has reported from troubled zones during wartime, to attract public opinion, in France and abroad, over those political changes. In August 2008, Lévy reported from South Ossetia, Georgia, during the 2008 South Ossetia war; on that occasion he interviewed the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.