Italiano
War – La Guerra desiderata by Gianni Zanasi will be screened tomorrow, Monday October 17th at 6:30 pm in Sala Sinopoli at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone within the context of the seventeenth Rome Film Fest. The filmmaker directs a romantic comedy set in a dystopian world: a brawl among teenagers that ended in violence leads Italy into war against Spain and France. In Rome, the lives of the clam farmer played by Edoardo Leo, of the psychologist Miriam Leone, her brother the aviator, the easygoing bartender Giuseppe Battiston, of Stefano Fresi and Carlotta Natoli, slip little by little into the paranoia of war. The film is included in the Grand Public section.
Two films from the Progressive Cinema Competition are in today’s programme. Jeong-sun, scheduled to be screened at the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna at 3:30 pm, is the first feature-length film by Jeong Ji-hye. The young filmmaker addresses a problem of burning relevance: the rise in digital sex crimes in South Korea, the victims of which encounter countless difficulties in pursuing legal action because of gender inequality and an inadequate response by the government.
At 7 pm in Sala Petrassi, there will be a screening of Raymond & Ray by Rodrigo García, who demonstrates a remarkable ability to reinvent genres (road movie, comedy, family drama) and build characters you can fall in love with. The protagonists of the films are two step-brothers, united by a father with whom they each had a conflicted relationship, to say the least, and whose funeral they must attend: Ewan McGregor (who plays an unusual role for him) and Ethan Hawke.
Four films from the Freestyle programme are on the schedule. At 5:30 pm the MAXXI will present Dario Fo: L’ultimo Mistero Buffo by Gianluca Rame. On August 1st 2016 in Rome, the great actor, playwright and Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo, at the age of ninety and at the end of his career, is about to take the stage with one of his warhorses, “Mistero buffo”, a revolutionary play that was censored at its debut. The film follows the actors as they bring Fo’s words to life, and his play becomes a space for meditation on the human condition and the distortions of power.
At 6 pm (Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna) the featured film will be Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues by Sacha Jenkins. Borrowing from the audio diaries of the great artist, the documentary filmmaker and musician Sacha Jenkins (Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men) revisits the music and reappraises the politics of the legendary trumpeter and jazz singer.
At 8:30 pm, at the MAXXI, there will be a presentation of 75 – Biennale Ronconi Venezia by Jacopo Quadri. In the mid-1970s, a generation became convinced that theatre could change the world. That period saw the rise of innovators who would go on to dominate the international scene over the following decades: Peter Brook, the Living Theatre, Jerzy Grotowski, Ariane Mnouchkine, Meredith Monk, Andrei Șerban, Giuliano Scabia, Dacia Maraini, Robert Wilson. Luca Ronconi, fresh from the international success of his Orlando furioso and Orestea, was nominated as director of La Biennale’s International Theatre Festival in 1974, and brought them all to Venice for an unforgettable festival-workshop.
In Sala Petrassi, at 10 pm, the screening will feature Life is (Not) a Game by Antonio Valerio Spera. Donning a white mask and a bright red wig, her voice altered by a device, Laika (who took her moniker from the dog who space- travelled in the Soviet Sputnik) has splashed the walls of Rome over the past two years pandemic with posters and murals that scream her civic indignation (the best-known is the one that imagines an embrace between Giulio Regeni and Patrick Zaki). Antonio Valerio Spera’s camera tracks two years of the mysterious street artist’s social causes, in the dead of night.
For the Best of 2022 section, at 9:30 pm Sala Sinopoli will host the screening of L’Envol by Pietro Marcello, the opening film of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Set in the 1920s in a village in northern France, and loosely inspired by the novel The Scarlet Sails written in 1923 by Russian author Aleksandr Grin, the new film by Pietro Marcello in certain ways takes its cues from mainstream cinema, while in others displays an absolutely contemporary use of the medium. Raphael Thièry is gruffly superb (in a performance reminiscent of Michel Simon in L’Atalante), and the original use of stock footage here is practically a hallmark of Marcello’s filmmaking.
At 4:30 pm Sala Petrassi will be the venue for the Paso Doble titled “Where is the Western Headed?” which will feature Francesca Comencini and Gabe Polsky. Comencini is the director of the series Django, inspired by the film of the same name by Sergio Corbucci, whereas Polsky is the author of Butcher’s Crossing, set in Colorado in 1870. The two works, both presented at the 2022 Fest, demonstrate the remarkable vitality of one of the most beloved of the classic film genres.
At 9 pm in the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna, the featured film will be Interactions, an anthology of twelve films by twelve directors: Faouzi Bensaïdi (Morocco), Clemente Bicocchi (Italy), Anne De Carbuccia (France/Usa), Takumã Kuikuro (Brazil/Amazonia), Oskar Metsavaht (Brazil), Eric Nazarian (Armenia/Usa), Yulene Olaizola and Rubén Imaz (Mexico), Bettina Oberli (Switzerland), Nila Madhab Panda (India), Janis Rafa (Greece/Netherlands) and Isabella Rossellini (Usa). The authors interrogate the relationship between man and animals, through biodiversity, climate change, nature conservation,
deforestation, the environment, health, fauna in general and marine fauna, water and much more. Interactions, which premieres at the Rome Film Fest, was conceived, developed and produced by Adelina von Fürstenberg.
Tomorrow, Monday October 17th at 11:30 am at the MAXXI, 100autori has organized a panel titled “Gender Equality. The role of networks. Present and future perspectives”, to explore the theme of gender equality. Platforms (OTT) and traditional broadcasters debate the strategies they are adopting to achieve real gender equality and promote the empowerment of women at every level of the audio-visual production industry in Italy.
At 3:30 pm, the MAXXI will hold the fourth event in the series “Dialogues on the future of Italian cinema”, this time dedicated to screenwriters: the guest speakers will include Stefano Bises, Maurizio Braucci, Francesco Bruni, Michele Pellegrini, Ludovica Rampoldi and Valia Santella. The encounter will be moderated by Laura Delli Colli.
In Sala Cinecittà at the Casa del Cinema, there are four screenings on the schedule. The first two are part of the line-up in the retrospective “Ms. Woodward and Mr. Newman” curated by Mario Sesti: Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! by Leo McCarey (at 11 am), and The Fugitive Kind by Sidney Lumet (at 3:30 pm).
The programme of documentaries in the History of Cinema section will be inaugurated at 6 pm by L’estate di Joe, Liz e Richard by Sergio Naitza, who returns to the Sardinian set of Boom, the film by Joseph Losey starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, the search for the reasons behind the film’s box-office flop. At 9 pm, Tacones Lejanos by Pedro Almodóvar will be presented by the protagonist of the film, Marisa Paredes. The actress is also a member of the Rome Film Fest jury which will award the “Ugo Tognazzi” Prize for Best Comedy.
Sala Kodak will hold repeat screenings at 3 pm, at 5:15 pm, at 6:30 pm and at 9:15 pm, of the following films: The Stolen Children by Gianni Amelio, the second episode of The Last Movie Stars by Ethan Hawke, Hud by Martin Ritt and finally La porta del cielo by Vittorio De Sica followed by the documentary Argento Puro by Matteo Ceccarelli.
The line-up of repeat screenings continues at the Cinema Giulio Cesare movie theatre: in Sala 1, at 4 pm and at 6:30 pm, the screenings will feature Jeong-sun by Jeong Ji-hye and Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues by Sacha Jenkins; in Sala 3, at 4 pm, at 7 pm and at 10 pm, the featured films will be Butcher’s Crossing by Gabe Polsky, War – La Guerra desiderata by Gianni Zanasi and L’Envol by Pietro Marcello. Bassifondi by Trash Secco, Raymond & Ray by Rodrigo García and Life Is (Not) a Game by Antonio Valerio Spera will be the films in Sala 5 (respectively at 5 pm, at 7:30 pm and at 10:30 pm). In Sala 7 finally, the screening will feature La paz del futuro by Francesco Clerici and Luca Previtali (at 4 pm) and Dario Fo: l’ultimo Mistero Buffo by Gianluca Rame (at 9:30 pm).
The series of films from the Rome Film Fest selected by Nanni Moretti to be shown at the Nuovo Cinema Sacher continues: on Monday the 17th, the public is invited to see Rapiniamo
il Duce by Renato De Maria (at 4:30 pm), Astolfo by Gianni Di Gregorio (at 6:30 pm) and Il Colibrì by Francesca Archibugi (at 9pm).
At the Odeon theatre, in collaboration with AGIS and ANEC, three films from the Freestyle section will be screened for the public: at 7 pm, there will be a double feature with Enrico Cattaneo / Rumore bianco by Francesco Clerici and Ruggero Gabbai and Nino Migliori. Viaggio intorno alla mia stanza by Elisabetta Sgarbi, while at 9 pm, the theatre will screen Il Maledetto by Giulio Base with the participation of the director.
The Teatro Palladium kicks off its programme of films from the Rome Film Fest. The inaugural film will be Bassifondi, from the Freestyle section: at 8:30 pm the film will be presented by the director Trash Secco and the actors Romano Talevi and Gabriele Silli.
At Scena, there will be screenings of Daniel Pennac: Ho visto Maradona! (at 6:30 pm) and Il Maledetto (at 9 pm).
Tacones lejanos by Pedro Almodóvar will be the film screened at the Libreria tra le righe bookshop, as part of the renewed collaboration between the Fest and the Independent Bookshops of Rome.
