Italiano
Geppi Cucciari returns to the stage of the Rome Film Fest: for the second consecutive year, the author and television host will be the godmother of the closing ceremony which will take place tomorrow, Saturday October 28th at 5 pm, in Sala Petrassi of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone.
A jury chaired by the actor, director and producer Gael Garcia Bernal composed of British director Sarah Gavron, Finnish director, screenwriter and poet Mikko Myllylahti, French actor and director Melvil Poupaud and Italian actress and director Jasmine Trinca will award the following prizes to the films in the Progressive Cinema Competition: Best Film, Jury Grand Prix, Best Director, Best Screenplay, the “Monica Vitti” Award for Best Actress, the “Vittorio Gassman” Award for Best Actor and the Special Jury Prize, to be selected among the categories of cinematography, editing and original soundtrack.
There will also be two acknowledgments selected from the line-ups of the Progressive Cinema Competition, Freestyle and Grand Public sections: the BNL BNP Paribas Best First Feature Prize awarded by a jury chaired by filmmaker Paolo Virzì, with the French producer and distributor Adeline Fontan Tessaur and the playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan; and the “Ugo Tognazzi” Prize for Best Comedy which will be attributed by a jury chaired by French actress Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu with jury members Italian director and screenwriter Alessandro Aronadio and Italian screenwriter Lisa Nur Sultan.
Also to be announced the winner of the SIAE Cinema Award for Best Screenplay under 35, established in 2023 to highlight and support the talent of the new generations approaching filmmaking.
The first two episodes in the new season of Mare fuori, the record-breaking series co-produced by Rai and Picomedia, will premiere tomorrow, Saturday October 28th with a double event in the programme of the eighteenth Rome Film Fest and the twenty-first Alice nella città (at 7 pm in Sala Sinopoli, at 9:30 pm in the Auditorium Conciliazione).
The red carpet with the stars of the series will begin at 5:45 pm in the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone: the public can watch it from the Cavea superiore, where three thousand seats are available. At 8:45 pm, the cast will walk the red carpet of Alice nella città at the Auditorium Conciliazione: for the occasion, Via della Conciliazione will be closed to automobile traffic, as it has been during previous editions for Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp and Russell Crowe, to allow the many fans staked out there to see their favourites up close.
In Season Four of Mare fuori the characters find themselves metaphorically navigating on the open sea. Rosa, Carmine, Mimmo, Kubra, Dobermann, Cucciolo and Micciarella are fully aware that they are no longer attached to the life-saving anchor of the family. They are alone, pulled by the current out into the open sea. Now, they must overcome their most intimate fears every day to face life. They no longer have the unconditional love of their family behind them, but that of the friends they have chosen to navigate alongside them. In contrast to this story stand Pino, Edoardo, Cardiotrap, Giulia and Silvia who, for better or for worse, still live under the weight of the family bonds that condition their life. This is the time to grow up and that means understanding who you want to become and what you want to be. At this point, most of the inmates have come of adult age. Change is inevitable, but their personal growth is a choice that requires courage. They must decide how and where to orient their lives, their personal journey. Those who don’t do so allow others to do it for them. Freedom is not only to be found outside the prison, it is also an inner conquest dictated by the courage to choose. The harshness of the new director forces the kids to make a necessary choice: to rebel for their own self-determination. The conflict between the adults and the kids is inevitable in order to understand who one is, what one wants to become and to find the voice to express it.
At 10 pm (Sala Sinopoli), the screening will feature a film from the Grand Public section, The Performance by Shira Piven, the film adaptation of the last short story by the legendary playwright Arthur Miller, published in the New Yorker, in which the energy of dance intertwines with the portents of war. Harold May, a virtuoso tap dancer and an American Jew, on a European tour with his troupe, gets an offer from a German that he can’t refuse: a handsome sum for arranging a performance in Berlin. The German doesn’t know that Harold is Jewish; the year is 1937, and when the troupe arrives in Germany, they learn they will be performing for Adolf Hitler himself.
At 7:30 pm, also in Sala Petrassi, there will be a screening of Orlando, ma biographie politique by Paul B. Preciado who constructs a bold, freewheeling meditation on the nature of transgender life. The pace is joyous and eclectic as the filmmaker experiments with and subverts the film medium, interweaving his own story and that of the novel’s main character with a panoply of collective experiences. An intergenerational troupe of trans and non-binary actors recite passages from the novel and share their personal stories, wittily comparing social and institutional structures. Presented at the Fest in the Best of 2023 section, the film won four awards at the 2023 Berlinale.
At 10 pm, Sala Petrassi will host Dall’alto di una fredda torre by Francesco Frangipane, adapted from the eponymous play by Filippo Gili (who is also the screenwriter). In the film, the normalcy of a family composed of a father, mother and two children is shattered by a terrible discovery: both the parents are gravely ill but only one of the two can be saved. Six characters (the family and two doctors) in search of a painful decision: Edoardo Pesce, Vanessa Scalera, Anna Bonaiuto, Giorgio Colangeli, Elena Radonicich, Massimiliano Benvenuto.
The programme of the Grand Public section will feature, at 6 pm (Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna) the screening of Jules by Marc Turtletaub, a very close and surreal encounter between a laconic and highly telepathic E.T. who wants only to repair his spaceship and (instead of three boys) three elderly people, Milton and two eccentric neighbours and co-members of the city council. Ben Kingsley leads the cast in Turtletaub’s new film, with its lonely heartland setting, its misfits (both oldsters and aliens) who hit it off, and a new vitality that beckons. Jules is played by stuntwoman Jade Quon.
Three films from the Special Screenings section are scheduled for tomorrow:
At 3:30 pm, the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna will host the screening of Marching People (Uomini in marcia) by Peter Marcias. In the archives of the Cineteca Sarda, Peter Marcias found the video documentation of a now-forgotten event, which in 1992/92 involved twenty-seven municipalities in the area of Sulcis Iglesiente. A major mobilisation of the unions and the political and social forces to demand new development for the territory. But what happened before that? And above all, what happened afterwards? Marcias starts from the past to talk about the injustices of today’s labour market; and asks for enlightenment from three witnesses: his mentor Gianni Loy, a professor of labour law, and two great filmmakers, Laurent Cantet and Ken Loach.
At 9 pm in the same theatre the featured screening will be Tante facce nella memoria by Francesca Comencini, who brings to the screen the play she curated with Mia Benedetta, adapted from the recordings gathered by Alessandro Portelli between 1997 and 1999, hundreds of oral testimonies regarding the 1944 Fosse Ardeatine massacre in Rome. This film presents the word-for-word accounts of some of the witnesses to that tragic event.
At 8 pm, the MAXXI will feature Via Sicilia 57/59 Giorgio Albertazzi. Il teatro è vita by Fabio Masi and Pino Strabioli. The Teatro delle Arti in Rome comes back to life in Albertazzi’s memories, carefully recorded by his friend Alessandro Giupponi: they evoke the brushstrokes of Guttuso or De Pisis, the notes of Petrassi and Stravinsky, the voices of the ‘Annas’ (Magnani and Proclemer), as well as Tofano, Eduardo, Gassman, Vittorio De Sica, Fellini, Carmelo Bene. This footage, together with materials from the archives of Rai and Istituto Luce, is the heart of the film written to celebrate the centennial of Giorgio Albertazzi’s birth.
Two films from the Freestyle section will also be shown at the MAXXI.
At 3:30 pm, the screening will feature Dispararon al pianista by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal. In the documentary, a journalist from New York decides to discover the truth about the disappearance of Francisco Tenório Jr., a famous samba jazz pianist who disappeared while on tour in Argentina in 1976: the search lasting years is transposed into the colours and evocations of animation that become protest cinema, accompanied by the music of João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Bil, Vinicius de Moraes and Paulo Moura. The film will be screened a second time, at the MAXXI, at 10 pm.
At 6 pm, the screening will feature Lucio Amelio by Nicolangelo Gelormini. Lucio Amelio was a fundamental figure on the international art scene: he was the person who in 1980 put Andy Warhol – the greatest exponent of American pop art – in touch with the German artist Joseph Beuys; he also, just a few months after his memorable encounter, brought the world’s most famous visual artists to his hometown of Naples, which had recently been hit by a devastating earthquake.
At 11:30 am, the MAXXI will host the event “Da quassù si vede il mare” in which Tor Bella Monaca comes up to the stage of the Rome Film Fest, projecting onto the city a different image of itself. It does so with an interactive web doc that starts from the top of one of the towers and immerses viewers into the past and present of Italy’s most public neighbourhoods. A journey through struggle and abandon, memory and future, anger and commitment. An opportunity to discover the Tor Bella Monaca that’s not in the headlines, in live interviews with the team at the Cantiere di Rigenerazione Educativa.
At Casa del Cinema, the ample programme of the History of Cinema section continues.
At 7:30 pm, Sala Cinecittà hosts Chambre 999 by Lubna Playoust: forty years after the film Room 666 by Wim Wenders, a new generation of directors, including James Gray, Olivier Assayas, Alice Rohrwacher and Asghar Farhadi, answer the same question as before: is cinema an art destined to die?
At 9:30 pm in Sala Cinecittà, the screening will feature Stato di grazia by Luca Telese in which the journalist investigates the legal case of Ambrogio Crespi. It’s a long road down which paradox becomes reality, the nightmare turns into the actual bars of a prison cell, and fear permeates the stale air inside it. This is the story of a journey: a journey through the limbo of the Italian justice system. The film will be shown concurrently in Sala Fellini as well.
At 3:30 pm in Sala Cinecittà there will be an encounter titled “Deodato, non solo horror”, in collaboration with ANAC and Ruggero Deodato’s children: materials, trailers, interviews, advertising and guests to remember a different Deodato, the author of realist films, comedies, detective stories and television series. The moderator will be film critic Marco Giusti.
Two repeat screenings will take place in Sala Fellini. At 5 pm, Peeping Tom by Michael Powell, and at 7 pm, Autumn Sonata by Ingmar Bergman.
Tomorrow, Saturday October 28th at 6 pm, Ferrero Cinema Atlantic movie theatre kicks of its line-up of films from the Fest: the first screening will be Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill. The documentary, based on the unpublished memoirs of Anita Pallenberg and narrated by Scarlett Johansson, tells the story of an inveterate rock’n’roller, actress, muse and mother who burst onto the scene in the 1960s and 70s. Anita invites us into her world with the help of friends and family, including her children Marlon and Angela and their father Keith Richards. Home movies and family photographs explore life with the Rolling Stones, in a bittersweet tale that oscillates between triumph and heartbreak.
The programming continues at the Nuovo Cinema Aquila with the screening of Roma, santa e dannata by Daniele Ciprì at 9 pm. The last event at the Ferrero Cinema Adriano is Et la fête continue! by Robert Guédiguian (at 9 pm).
Tomorrow, October 28th, the programme of repeat screenings of the films from the eighteenth Rome Film Fest continues at the Cinema Giulio Cesare. Sala 1 will host several screenings: at 4 pm, audiences can see Marching People by Peter Marcias, at 6:30 pm Jules by Marc Turtletaub and at 9:30 pm Tante facce nella memoria by Francesca Comencini. There will be four repeat screenings in Sala 3 where at 4 pm the feature is Who to Love by Giorgio Testi, at 5:30 pm Roma, santa e dannata by Daniele Ciprì, at 7:30 pm 19.30 Negramaro – Back Home. Ora so restare by Giorgio Testi, and at 10 pm The Performance by Shira Piven. There will be 3 repeat screenings in Sala 5: Fela, il mio dio vivente by Daniele Vicari (at 5 pm), Orlando, ma biographie politique by Paul B. Preciado (at 8 pm) and Dall’alto di una fredda torre by Francesco Frangipane (at 10:30 pm). In Sala 7 there will be four screenings for the audiences of the Rome Film Fest: at 3:30 pm Nino Migliori. La festa che rovescia il mondo per gioco by Elisabetta Sgarbi, at 7 pm Accattaroma by Daniele Costantini, at 9 pm Via Sicilia 57/59. Giorgio Albertazzi. Il teatro è vita by Fabio Masi and Pino Strabioli, at 10:30 pm Jules by Marc Turtletaub.
