Italiano
Tomorrow, Friday October 20th at 4 pm in Sala Sinopoli at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, Isabella Rossellini will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award of the eighteenth Rome Film Fest. The acknowledgment will be conferred by Renzo Arbore and Alice Rohrwacher during the Masterclass that the artist will hold with the audience of the Fest.
For the Grand Public section, at 7 pm in Sala Sinopoli there will be a screening of Te l’avevo detto by Ginevra Elkann. After her debut with Magari, the director writes (with Chiara Barzini) and directs a dark comedy, sad, grotesque and riddled with anxiety. It features an all-star (primarily female) cast: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, Greta Scacchi, Danny Huston, Riccardo Scamarcio. The film is set in Rome in early January: the Christmas decorations are still on the trees, when a freak heat wave hits the city, and temperatures slowly begin to rise to 30 degrees. As the heat continues to increase, so do anxieties and neuroses.
In the same theatre, at 9:30 pm, for the Freestyle section, there will be a screening of the first episode of La storia, the series based on the novel by Elsa Morante, one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: with 800,000 copies sold in Italy in one year alone, the book was later translated into over twenty languages. The director will meet the audiences. Following the adaptation by Luigi Comencini in 1986, Ida’s tragic and passionate story returns to the screen in the eight-episode television series directed by Francesca Archibugi, who also wrote the screenplay with Francesco Piccolo, Giulia Caenda and Ilaria Macchia.
Also for the Freestyle section, the MAXXI will host the screening of Kim’s Video by David Redmon. For over twenty years, film fans in New York had access to a treasure trove of rare and impossible-to-find videos thanks to Kim’s Video, a video rental store managed by the mysterious Yong-man Kim, who gathered over 55,000 films before closing the store in 2008. Now director David Redmon goes in search of this immense lost collection, going all the way to Sicily, where he is embroiled in a political hornet’s nest, and to South Korea.
Two films in the Progressive Cinema Competition are on the schedule for today:
The first at 4:30 pm in Sala Petrassi is Death is a Problem for the Living. Halfway between a comedy and a noir, between Kaurismäki and early Winding Refn, the new feature-length film by Finnish director Teemu Nikki (winner of Orizzonti Extra in Venice in 2021 with The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic) is a laconic and sanguine buddy movie.
At 9:30 pm the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna will host the screening of La erecciòn de Toribio Bardelli. Set in the melancholy mostly nocturnal city of Lima, the film is a grotesque play of characters, sometimes heart-rending sometimes ironic, by Adriàn Saba, the most promising of young Peruvian directors.
Two films from the Best of 2023 section will be screened at Sala Petrassi.
At 6:45 pm, the film will be The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer, Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes 2023. After Birth and Under the Skin the director draws inspiration from the magnificent novel of the same name written in 2014 by Martin Amis (who died on May 19th this year), capturing its essence: the domestic serenity of the family of Rudolf Hoss, the first commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his wife Hedwig, who was never affected by the noise, the odours, the horrors. A lucid and rigorous picture, chilling in its abstraction.
At 9:15 pm, the programme features Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg by Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom. The documentary, based on the unpublished memories of Anita Pallenberg and narrated by Scarlett Johansson, tells the story of a die-hard rock’n’roller, an actress, muse and mother who rose to fame in the 1960s and 70s. Anita introduces us into her world, with the help of friends and family, which include her children Marlon and Angela and their father Keith Richards.
Four are the titles in the line-up of the Special Screenings section. The first three will be screened in the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna.
At 3 pm audiences are invited to attend Quattro quinti by Stefano Urbanetti, a docufilm about blind football, starring the athletes from the Asdd Roma 2000 team during the final phase of the season: the locker room, the training sessions, the games. Each talks about their inner world and how they transformed their visual impairment into a resource.
At 5 pm, the screening will present Kripton by Francesco Munzi, a film that arose out of a series of encounters inside two psychiatric institutions on the outskirts of the city of Rome, with young men and women suffering from psychiatric disorders to whom he grew increasingly close: six young people who voluntarily chose to be hospitalised and struggle with various disorders.
At 7:30 pm there will be a presentation of Maria Callas: lettere e memorie by Tom Volf and Yannis Dimolitsas. The film tells the story of the international tour, between November 2019 and January 2023, of the play Maria Callas – Lettere e memorie, starring Monica Bellucci and staged by Tom Volf: a comparison between two eras and the syntony between two women who share their love for the art.
At 5:30 pm, the MAXXI will host Rules of Two Walls by David Gutnik, which looks at the war in Ukraine through the eyes of the artists who stayed in their native land to make art as resistance to the aggression and a search for identity, in music, painting, street art and the very art of filming in the midst of air-raid alarms and missile attacks.
On October 20th at 8 pm, the Teatro Palladium will host the presentation of Negramaro – Back Home. Ora so restare, directed by Giorgio Testi. At the theatre will be all the members of the famous band who, after a successful twenty-year career, return home to Galatina in the Salento where it all started. Surrounded by the artists and friends (Fiorella Mannoia, Niccolò Fabi, Samuele Bersani, Diodato, Malika Ayane, Ermal Meta, Samuel, Ariete, Aiello, Cesare Dell’anna, Raffaele Casarano, Rosa Chemical, Sangiovanni, Nicoletta Manni and Timofej Andrijashenko) who have accompanied and shared their music, Negramaro celebrate twenty years of flight, between dream and reality.
The Mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, will open the encounter organized by SIAE tomorrow at 11 am at Casa del Cinema – titled “The Art of Dubbing. Writing and Voices in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. Technological Revolution and Human Experience at the Microphones in the Dubbing Studio”. Rodolfo Bianchi (President of ADID), Toni Biocca (Vice-President of AIDAC, President of the SIAE Cinema Committee), Fabrizia Castagnoli (Audiovisual Delegate Nuovo Imaie), Marina D’Aversa (Treasurer AIDAC, Component of the SIAE Cinema Committee), Daniele Giuliani (President ANAD), Domenico Luca Scordino (Consultant to SIAE, Studio Elled) and Francesco Vairano (President AIDAC) will participate in the discussion moderated by Laura Delli Colli (President of Film Journalists SNGCI), about the impact of artificial intelligence, from an artistic and legal point of view, for adapters, dubbers and all those involved in the chain. The panel will also be streamed at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yTkczMTs3Y.
The line-up at Casa del Cinema will host, at 5 pm, Left Luggage by Jeroen Krabbé, as part of the tribute to Isabella Rossellini. The artist states: “Krabbé is a great Dutch actor, with whom I have always worked, who wanted to make his debut as a director. He asked me to play the part of an Orthodox Jewish mother in the 1970s, in Antwerp. I asked him ‘why don’t you choose a Jewish actress? I’m Catholic, Italian, what do I have to do with it?’ … Not only is it a great film, but for me it was like an anthropological experience, I discovered a world”.
At 7:30 pm, in the same theatre, there will be a screening of Quel maledetto film su Virzì by Stefano Petti. After gathering hundreds of interviews to make the definitive film about Paolo Virzì, three documentary filmmakers argue about how to conclude the project. The documentary will be presented by the director and by the cast, while the closing remarks at the end of the screening will be given by Paolo Virzì.
At 9:30 pm, the filmmaker will present the restored version of Ovosodo (restored by Infinity+), the brilliant and bitter social comedy that over the years has become a cult Italian film. In the theatre with the director, the members of the cast: Regina Orioli, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Marco Cocci.
There will be two repeat screenings at Casa del Cinema, in Sala Fellini: at 7:45 pm, the three short films directed by Isabella Rossellini, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the eighteenth Rome Film Fest, Seduce Me, Green Porno, FOX Film, and at 9 pm the documentary by Luca Lancise titled L’Impero della Natura. Una note al Parco del Colosseo.
The programme of repeat screenings at the Cinema Giulio Cesare on Friday October 20th will begin at 4 pm with Who To Love by Giorgio Testi and will continue with Kripton by Francesco Muzi at 5:30 pm and Maria Callas: lettere e memorie by Tom Volf at 8 pm. In Sala 3 there will be a screening of Diabolik chi sei? by the Manetti Bros. (at 4:30 pm), Te l’avevo detto by Ginevra Elkann (at 7:30 pm) and La storia by Francesca Archibugi (at 10 pm). In Sala 5 the screenings will feature Death is a Problem for the Living by Teemu Nikki at 5 pm, The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer at 7 pm, Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill at 9:30 pm. In Sala 7 at 3:30 pm they will be Taking Venice by Amei Wallach and at 5:30 pm L’impero della Natura. Una notte al Parco del Colosseo by Luca Lancise.
During the course of the Rome Film Fest there will be a new space dedicated entirely to cinema, in collaboration with the Fondazione Cinema per Roma. The Fuori Festa will be set up at the Hotel St. Regis, a few steps away from Via Veneto. Fuori Festa is open to all accredited visitors of the Rome Film Fest, to the guests of the St. Regis Hotel, in addition to producers, distributors and journalists. Info: https://www.fuorifesta.it/.
