‘The mode of production for cinema is anarchy; I hope it can go on a little longer, I hope that we can keep on making a bit of anarchy with cinema.’ This quote by Marco Ferreri, taken from an unpublished interview with the great filmmaker who died ten years ago on 9 May 1997, is part of a documentary film, Marco Ferreri: the Director Who Came from the Future, that Mario Canale is bringing to the RomeFilmFest as a tribute to the great director of Dillinger is Dead, La Grande Bouffe, and Bye Bye Monkey.

‘It will premiere in the Extra Section over the course of a day dedicated to Marco Ferreri that we are arranging along with his wife Jacqueline,’ says Mario Sesti, Artistic Director of the festival, ‘and it will include the restored version of Papal Audience; a montage of censored sequences from his films, which is being put together by the Cineteca di Bologna; the alternate ending for A Most Unusual Woman, retrieved by the Cineteca Nazionale del Centro Sperimentale; and a montage of all Ferreri’s television appearances, produced by the Rai Archives. In short, it will be a tribute by which film culture and film institutions, together with the RomeFilmFest, will remember a director without whom contemporary Italian cinema would never have been the same.’

The documentary by Mario Canale, produced by Surf Film, La 7 and Orme, contains – apart from the many conversations with Ferreri that Mario Canale filmed starting in the 1980s – excerpts from films, pictures of the sets, and interviews with collaborators and friends, screenwriters, producers, actors and artists, from Sergio Castellitto to Gerard Depardieu, from Jacqueline Ferreri to Enzo Iannacci, from Christopher Lambert to Citto Maselli, from Ornella Muti to Michele Placido and Catherine Spaak.