Day 3 | The programme for Saturday, 19th

Saturday 19 October, the winner of the Lifetime Achievement award Viggo Mortensen will hold a Masterclass for the audiences of the Rome Film Fest. During the encounter – which will be held at 4 pm in Sala Sinopoli of the Auditorium Parco della Musica – Viggo Mortensen will talk about his second experience behind the camera for the film The Dead Won’t Hurt, to be previewed at the Fest, and will review his extraordinary artistic career.

At 6 pm Sala Sinopoli will show a preview of The Return by Uberto Pasolini. In his reinterpretation of the Odyssey, Uberto Pasolini brings together Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, who starred together in The English Patient. His classical style embraces the epic power of the story; the camera clings to the faces of the two actors; their gazes and their words, dense with pathos, convey the deep meaning of a timeless myth.

At 9 pm, in the same venue, there will be a screening of The Count of Monte Cristo, the series directed by Bille August, the Danish director who has won two Golden Palm awards, for Pelle the Conqueror (which also won the Oscar® for best foreign-language film) and The Best Intentions. After more than twenty versions for film and television, the immortal romantic hero created by Alexandre Dumas in the mid-nineteenth century returns in an eight-episode television series, starring Sam Claflin, with Jeremy Irons in the role of the Abbé Faria.

Sala Petrassi will be the venue for two screenings from the Grand Public section. At 9:30 pm the feature will be Eterno visionario by Michele Placido. The director – inspired by the biography written by Matteo Collura and titled “Il gioco delle parti”, brings the life of Luigi Pirandello to the screen, from the sulphur mines of Sicily at its most backward, to Stockholm, where he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1934. Fabrizio Bentivoglio congenially plays the role of an artist who grasped the dissolution of personal identity early in the 20th century, and ably depicted society’s traps and intrinsic pretence.

At 4:30 pm there will be a screening of Libre by Mélanie Laurent, an action noir that tells the true story of Bruno Sulak (Lucas Bravo): a gentleman thief who avoided bloodshed, compared in his time to Arsène Lupin, an outlaw who outsmarts the police with his vitality and his yearning for freedom.

Also in Sala Petrassi, at 7 pm, the public is invited to watch Reading Lolita in Tehran by Eran Riklis. Adapted from the 2003 best-seller by Azar Nafisi, who returned to the United States in 1997 to teach at Washington University, the film is about the protagonist’s struggle to transmit beauty and culture to the increasingly catechised students following Khomeini’s revolution in 1979, and after leaving public teaching, to share her weekly seminars with her seven best female students.

Three screenings are scheduled to be held in Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna. At 3:30 pm, the feature will be La casa di tutti, a short film by the Manetti Bros. shot inside Saint Peter’s. The film contains a message of hope and solidarity and was made for the first World Children’s Day. At 5:30 pm, there will be a screening of Titanus 1904 by Giuseppe Rossi: the documentary tells the remarkable story of the Lombardo family and Titanus, the pillar of Italian and international cinema. At 8:30 pm, the programme features Querido Trópico by Ana Endara, a documentary filmmaker who has made her first fiction film. It deals with themes such as care, solitude, rage, unfulfilled desires, in a touching yet surprising story.

The MAXXI will host three films from the Special Screenings section.

At 4 pm, the screening will feature I nipoti dei fiori by Aureliano Amadei, who recomposes the fragments of his childhood spent traveling and in hippy communities: in this journey of rediscovery, he meets many people who, like him, grew up breathing the winds of the great social transformations of the 1970s.

At 6:30 pm, the public is invited to watch Estado de silencio by Santiago Maza. The documentary, produced by Diego Luna for the Mexican label “La Corriente del Golfo”, in collaboration with Gael Garcia Bernal, is a distressing documentary, of great urgency and relevance. The film provides a powerful and humane account of the terror experienced by Mexican journalists, committed to denounce corruption and the drug cartels.

It will be followed at 9 pm by Blanket Weaver by Park Jeong-mi, at her first experience as a filmmaker. The director decided to abandon everything and to literally live without touching money for a year: with a borrowed bicycle and a camcorder that films everything except her, Jeong-mi begins an adventurous journey in search of herself.

Tomorrow, Saturday 19 October at 6:30 pm at the Teatro Olimpico, there will be a screening of Eroici! 100 anni di passione e racconti di sport by Giuseppe Marco Albano. On the prestigious occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Corriere dello Sport newspaper, the documentary explores the deep essence of sports, a veritable social and cultural collector, and the evolution in the way sports are practiced and reported.

October 19th 1984 was the release date of Stop Making Sense, the historic film-concert by the Talking Heads, a milestone in rock documentaries made by the Oscar®-winning filmmaker Jonathan Demme. Exactly forty years later, on October 19 2024, the Rome Film Fest will present the new edition of the film restored in 4K, under the supervision of James Mockoski from American Zoetrope, with a soundtrack totally remastered under the superviison of the guitarist of the Talking Heads, Jerry Harrison. The two will be the protagonists of a Paso Doble with the audience of the Teatro Olimpico after the screening of the film, scheduled to start at 9 pm.

There will be three events from the History of Cinema section at Casa del Cinema.

At 4:30 pm, the screening will feature the documentary Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes by Kathryn Ferguson who explores the life and career of Humphrey Bogart, an icon of the golden age of Hollywood, told through the voice of the legendary actor.

At 7 pm, the screening will feature Il pianto delle zitelle by Giacomo Pozzi Bellini, the first example of an anthropological documentary made in Italy, restored by La Cinémathèque française and the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna.  The film will be preceded by an encounter with Elisabetta Giovagnoni. It will be followed by a screening of Valerio Zurlini, peintre des sentiments by Sandra Marti, who conveys the depth of the work of an important, extraordinary director of actors. Sandra Marti and the film critic Jean Gili will talk about it with the spectators.

At 9 pm, the director and screenwriter Francesca Comencini will introduce the screening of Senza sapere niente di lei, made by her father Luigi Comencini. The film will be presented in the version restored by the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Les Films du Camélia, based on the original negative and soundtrack made available by Mediaset, in the laboratories of L’Immagine Ritrovata, by kind concession of Mediaset.

On the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of UNICEF, Casa del Cinema will show a screening, at 11 am, of Milk Teeth – Essere bambine in Afghanistan. Fatima is seven years old and, like many little girls her age, she is experiencing a particular moment in her childhood: she is losing her baby teeth. But there is one important fact: Fatima absolutely does not want them to fall out. If they do, it will mean that she is growing up and will soon be a woman, like the many other invisible women of her country: Afghanistan. And so she cooks up a plan to remain a child forever, but to do so she will have to undertake an out-of-the ordinary dream-journey… The film is inspired by an idea by Alessandra Mastronardi and Giuseppe Carrieri, and is a production of Natia Docufilm; directed by Amin Meerzad; the animation direction I by Maria Matilde Fondi, and the editing by Carlotta Marrucci.

This year again, the Rome Film Fest will involve the entire city. Starting tomorrow, Saturday October 19th through Thursday October 24th, the Teatro Palladium will host a selection of films from the Progressive Cinema, Freestyle and Special Screenings sections. The first screening will be tomorrow at 8 pm, with Marko Polo by Elisa Fuksas who offers a painful and ironic reflection on faith (not just religious faith) and on the concept of failure.

In the programme of repeat screenings, tomorrow Saturday 19 October at 3:30 pm at Cinema Giulio Cesare in Sala 1, the featured film will be Arsa by MASBEDO; it will be followed, at 6 pm, by Saturday Night by Jason Reitman and at 8:30 pm by The Dead Don’t Hurt by Viggo Mortensen. Sala 3 will be the venue for the screening of Fino alla fine by Gabriele Muccino (at 4:30 pm), Reading Lolita in Tehran by Eran Riklis (at 7:30 pm) and Querido Tropico by Ana Endara (at 9:45 pm). In Sala 7, Italo Calvino nella città by Davide Ferrario will be screened at 4:30 pm and I nipoti dei fiori by Aureliano Amadei at 6:30 pm.

The programme of repeat screenings continues at the Teatro Olimpico with a double event for Avetrana – Qui non è Hollywood by Pippo Mezzapesa: the first two episodes will be screened at 12 noon, and episodes 3 and 4 at 3:30 pm.

At 2 pm, at the MAXXI, there will be a screening of a film from the Special Screenings section, Ferrari: Fury & The Monster by Steve Hoover.