Italiano
Tomorrow, Friday October 14th, will be the first day in the programme of the Progressive Cinema Competition, the new competitive section of the Rome Film Fest: it begins at 6:30 pm, in Sala Petrassi of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, with La cura by Francesco Patierno. The film is set in Naples at the height of the lockdown, in a spectral city beyond time, for a contemporary reinterpretation of Albert Camus’ La peste, in which the book’s feelings, fears and conflicts slip harmoniously into the disorientation brought on by the pandemic, whereas pieces of reality, such as the desperate man screaming in the streets at night, reflect the text. A hospital and its doctors and volunteers, the city officials, the tradesmen, everyday people, all mix with a crew making a film of La Peste, in a terse and engaging shared drama.
At 9 pm in the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna, the Progressive Cinema Competition will feature the screening of Sanctuary, the new romantic thriller by Zachary Wigon, who had previously explored the deception, the tricks and the black holes in the relations between man and woman in The Heart Machine. In Sanctuary, Rebecca is a dominatrix escort, Hal her wealthy client, ready for anything: closed in a room, they engage with one another in erotic games, rebukes, threats, blackmail, they reveal dark sides, anxieties and fragilities, while the camera and the dialogue veer from the erotic to the noir. But everything, including the finale, is unpredictable.
At 10 pm in Sala Sinopoli, there will be a preview showing of the first two episodes in the series Romulus II – La Guerra per Roma (Freestyle section). Magical rituals, ambushes, battles,
priestesses, old curses and new conflicts create a spectacular emotional crescendo that leads to the discovery of Romulus’ identity. Matteo Rovere again leads the ideation, screenplay and direction (of some episodes) of the visionary epic of the founding of Rome, steeped in magic, flesh, and doubt. The directors of other episodes include Enrico Maria Artale, Michele Alhaique and Francesca Mazzoleni.
At 6 pm, the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna will host a film from the Freestyle section, Lynch/Oz by Alexandre O. Philippe. Following the highly appreciated film essay The People vs. George Lucas and78/52 (about the shower scene in Psycho), the director explores the ties between The Wizard of Oz (1943) by Victor Fleming and the disturbing fantastical world of David Lynch, recognizing the influence of the former not only where it is most obvious (Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks) but also where it is more subtle and sometimes even deep: from The Elephant Man to Mulholland Drive to Lost Highway.
Starting at 5:30 pm, the MAXXI will host the screenings of Enrico Cattaneo/Rumore bianco by Francesco Clerici and Ruggero Gabbai and Nino Migliori. Viaggio intorno alla mia stanza by Elisabetta Sgarbi: both the screenings are part of the Freestyle programme. In the first documentary, the directors look at the figure of Enrico Cattaneo, a unique photographer who began his career doing photo reports, then fell in love with the artists of Arte Povera, becoming their trusted photographer, and then became an artist himself, playing with forms and objects. In the second documentary, Elisabetta Sgarbi allows herself to be “captured” by the photographs of Nino Migliori, who will meet the audience after the screening. The maestro, born in 1926, progressed from a subtly surrealistic vision of everyday life to a dimension of experimentation and abstraction. The film is not only an evocation of a method and a treatise on pataphysical techniques (polagram, lucigram), it also becomes the story of a romantic pursuit, between Migliori and his partner Marina Truant, which takes place entirely in a room opened by a musical score by Mirco Mariani.
The Grand Public section will be inaugurated at 9:30 pm in Sala Petrassi with the screening of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris by Anthony Fabian. A pink dress that looks like a cloud, all transparency and flowers of gems, a vaporous new look by Dior, hanging in the home of a client where Ada does the cleaning. The desire for a dress becomes the trigger that changes her life: in the mid-1950s, Ada puts together the money she needs (thanks to a surprise “from the other world” from her husband who died in the war) and flies from London to Paris, straight to Maison Dior.
There are two Special Screenings scheduled for tomorrow, Friday October 14th. At 8 pm the MAXXI will host the film Kordon by Alice Tomassini follows four Ukrainian women, four volunteers who go back and forth between their country and Hungary, trying to do something to restore hope to a people under siege. Four people out of over seven million women and children who are fleeing the war, wondering what it means, in today’s world, to cross a line as invisible as it is real, such as the boundary between two Nations. At 10 pm the MAXXI will feature the screening of Rules of War, the new film by Guido Hendrikx which takes viewers to a country devastated by war, Sudan, following the Red Cross delegate and
former soldier Albert Schoneveld in a journey through the world’s conflict zones to teach hardened soldiers the rules of fair warfare.
The Best of 2022 section will feature two screenings. At 3:30 pm, the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna will host the film All That Breathes: director Shaunak Sen, who lives in New Delhi, dives with the brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, self-taught veterinarians who believe in the interconnection between human and animal life, into their battle for change, which becomes a diagnosis of a city in disarray. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at Sundance 2022 and the Oeil d’or for Best Documentary at Cannes.
At 7 pm in Sala Sinopoli, the screening will feature Coupez! by Michel Hazanavicius who, in his pop culture parody vein, serves up a literal remake of One Cut of the Dead, the cult movie and thesis film by Ueda Shinichiro in 2017, embellishing the original’s zaniness with surreal French-Japanese touches and a sardonic nod at the chance nature of cinematic inventions. This was the opening film of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
James Ivory, winner of the 2022 Rome Film Fest Lifetime Achievement Award, will hold a masterclass with the audience of the Fest during which he will review the stories and techniques of his films. Born in 1928, the American filmmaker has made thirty-two films as a director, plus his early short films, receiving four nominations for the Oscar® as Best Director and one Oscar® for Best Screenplay, which he won at age 89 for Call Me by Your Name by Luca Guadagnino. The event will be held at 4:30 pm in Sala Petrassi. At 3:30 pm, Ivory will be the featured guest at Casa del Cinema to present one of his great box-office hits, Mr. & Mrs.Bridge: a marriage, the passing of times, unexpressed regrets, in a monument to the steadfast beauty of the couple Newman-Woodward, to whom the Fest pays tribute. The encounter will be moderated by Emanuela Martini.
At 4 pm, Sala Sinopoli will be the venue for the Paso Doble titled “Bewitched by the big screen”, which will involve two of the most important Italian writers and screenwriters, Sandro Veronesi and Francesco Piccolo. Both winners of the Premio Strega (the former for the novels “Caos calmo” and “Il colibri”, from which the opening film of the 2022 Rome Film Fest was adapted, the latter for “Il desiderio di essere come tutti”), Veronesi and Piccolo will talk to the public about the relation between cinema and writing. The encounter will be moderated by Enrico Magrelli.
At 3.30 pm, the MAXXI will host the second event in “Dialogues on the Future of Italian Cinema” dedicated to producers, and moderated by Laura Delli Colli. Featured guests will be Francesca Cima (Indigo), Marta Donzelli (Vivo Film), Benedetto Habib (Indiana Production), Federica Lucisano (Italian International Film), Lorenzo Mieli (The Apartment), Domenico Procacci (Fandango) and Riccardo Tozzi (Cattleya).
The recently departed Jean-Luc Godard will be commemorated at 3:30 pm at the Casa del Cinema with the screening of Une Femme marièe: Michel Hazanavicius, who made a film about him, will introduce the screening with a remembrance of “his Godard” and present
this experimental film, which could almost be viewed as an ethnological essay about women in the 1960s.
At 6:45 pm, Casa del Cinema will present the screening of the first film in the programme of the Absolute Beginners section, Le Dernier Combat, Luc Besson’s sensational debut on the big screen, an apocalyptic film which he made at the young age of twenty-three. “Le Dernier Combat is my first feature film: a silent film, made in black and white in 1982, derived from my short film L’avant-dernier – explained the French filmmaker – Pierre Jolivet and I wrote the screenplay in ten days. Since there was not much we could expect from producers, we decided to produce it ourselves”.
In collaboration with the Regione Lazio, for the third consecutive year the programme of the Rome Film Fest will begin tomorrow, Friday October 15th, in the fifteen Shelter homes, where women find support in their process of emancipation from male violence to begin a new life project. Of the films in the 2022 Fest, the screenings will include two episodes from the series Sono Lillo by Eros Puglieli and the comedy Era Ora by Alessandro Aronadio. Other films will include La Freccia Azzurra by Enzo d’Alò, La donna elettrica by Benedikt Erlingsson and La mia vita da zucchina by Celine Sciamma.
The ample programme of repeat screenings will involve the entire city, from the centre to the suburbs.
At the Cinema Giulio Cesare, at 12:30 pm Sala 3 will show the film A Cooler Climate by Giles Gardner and James Ivory; at 5 pm, the opening film, Il Colibrì by Francesca Archibugi, will be presented, preceded by Luciano Pavarotti, la stella by Gianluigi Toccafondo, while at 7:30 pm and at 10:30 pm, the screening will feature Coupez! by Michel Hazanavicius and the first two episodes of Romulus II – La guerra per Roma by Matteo Rovere. In Sala 5, at 7 pm and at 9 pm, there will be repeat screenings of La cura and Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris.
Casa del Cinema will also present two repeat screenings in Sala Kodak: at 3 pm and at 5:30 pm, the first four episodes of The Last Movie Stars, directed by Ethan Hawke, a docu-series created and produced by Emily Wachtel with Adam Gibbs and Lisa Long Adler, with Martin Scorsese as the executive producer. At 8:15 pm, the audience is invited to see the film A Room With a View, a tribute to the cinema of James Ivory.
Starting in 2022, the Rome Film Fest comes to the Cinema Nuovo Sacher with a series of films selected by Nanni Moretti. The first film in the line-up will be Il colibrì by Francesca Archibugi, the opening film of the seventeenth Rome Film Fest. At 9 pm, the director will be in the theatre to introduce the screening of her film
In the programme of “Sale in Festa”, at 9 pm, Scena will present the screening of the documentary A Cooler Climate by James Ivory and Giles Gardner.
