Italiano
L’Arminuta by Giuseppe Bonito will be presented tomorrow, Friday October 15th at 7 pm, at the sixteenth Rome Film Fest, in Sala Sinopoli at the Auditorium Parco della Musica. In the film – from the line-up of the Fest’s Official Selection, adapted from the best-selling novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio winner of the Premio Campiello book award in 2017 – a thirteen-year-old girl is returned to the family she did not know she belonged to.
She has suddenly lost everything from her previous life: a comfortable home and the exclusive affection reserved to an only child as she is catapulted into an unfamiliar world. « Thanks to the novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, I came to know this 13-year-old girl whose name we will never know, just her nickname, l’Arminuta, which in the dialect of the Abruzzo region means the returned, explains the director. The film, like the novel, is about one year in the life of this girl on the threshold of adolescence, a time which will mark her life forever, in which she will feel pain and hardness as well as the sometimes fierce love, sweetness and beauty that life can bring us».
Two other films will be presented from the Official Selection of the Fest.
At 7:30 pm, in Sala Petrassi, the screening will feature Mediterràneo by Marcel Barrena, from the true story of Óscar Camps, the founder of Open Arms. In the fall of 2015, two Spanish lifeguards, Óscar and Gerard, distressed by the heart-wrenching photograph of a child who drowned in the Mediterranean, go to the island of Lesbos, where they discover a horrific reality: every day thousands of people risk their lives in an attempt to cross the sea on unsound boats, to escape the wars and misery that afflict their native countries. But the most disconcerting thing is that no one is conducting rescue operations. Together with Esther, Nico and the other members of their team, Óscar and Gerard will fight to do the work neglected by authorities and to bring thousands of people the help that they desperately need.
At 10 pm (Sala Sinopoli), the screening will feature Passing by Rebecca Hall. In New York, in the late 1920s, as the Afro-American cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance begins to emerge, two women of colour, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, succeed in passing as white. One summer afternoon, the two of them, who were childhood friends, meet by chance, and Irene, somewhat reluctantly, opens her home to Clare, who soon inspires the affection of Irene’s husband, family and entire social circle. As the lives of the two women gradually become closely intertwined, Irene realizes that Clare is unsettling her world, through obsessions, repressions and lies.
At 10:30 pm, in Sala Petrassi, the screening will feature Dear Evan Hansen by Stephen Chbosky, a co-production of the Rome Film Fest and Alice nella città. Evan is a high-school student who suffers from social anxiety. One of the letters he writes to motivate himself is stolen by a classmate, the solitary Connor, and is later found by Connor’s mother and stepfather after he kills himself. The letter stirs hope in the grief-stricken parents that Connor had found a friend in Evan. Out of compassion, Evan invents the story of a friendship that never existed: his lie will have an unexpected outcome.
At 6:30 pm, the MAXXI will feature the preview screening of Marina Cicogna – La vita e tutto il resto by Andrea Bettinetti, about the first woman producer to break through into the exclusively male world of Italian and European cinema in the late 1960s. The documentary tells the story of this undisputed icon of style and creativity, winner of an Oscar® for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, in an intimate journey between Rome, Milan and Venice, enriched with valuable interviews with her closest friends.
The MAXXI will also be the venue, at 4:30 pm, for the screening of Oltre la vita delle forme by Francesco Conversano and Nene Grignaffini: the Brion cemetery Complex and the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena will be the object of an emotional and symbolic journey through the visionary universe of two architects, Carlo Scarpa and Aldo Rossi.
Starting tomorrow, Friday October 15th and through October 23rd, the Casa Del Cinema will host the retrospective of the sixteenth Rome Film Fest, curated by Mario Sesti and dedicated to Arthur Penn, one of the most beloved and representative authors in the history of cinema: the American director and producer has, across the decades, brought the contradictions of contemporary society to movie screens, television and the theatre, balancing the capacity and pleasure of storytelling with the artist’s social and political responsibility. The line-up of the Retrospective will include thirteen films: it starts with The Left Handed Gun (at 6:00 pm), Mickey One (at 8:30 pm), The Miracle Worker (at 10:30 pm).
The programme of screenings in Rome’s independent bookstores continues: in the “L’ora della libertà” bookstore, at 7 pm, the public is invited to see Phantom Boy by Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol, while the Teatro San Leonardo, thanks to Acilia Libri, will host a screening of Smetto quando voglio by Sydney Sibilia.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the opening film of the Rome Film Fest, will be screened again on October 15th at 4:00 pm in Sala Sinopoli. In the Spazio Scena, there will be repeat screenings of the two Roman pre-opening films: Con il mare negli occhi at 5:00 pm, and Se dicessimo la verità at 9:00 pm
