Seen from above, EXTRA appears as a shimmering expanse of many-colored stones: it is the RomeFilmFest’s cutting edge, spearheading the festival’s fundamental survey and exploration of that territory that has remained uncharted up to now, or falls outside the consolidated domain that we know as cinema.

EXTRA contains such diverse experiences as the independent film with its aggressive style and dazzling impact (in EXTRA/Other Visions); the immediacy of the finest actors and directors on the scene today as they meet their public; and the celebration and commemoration of international cinema legends past and present (EXTRA/Tributes). It ranges in scope from the retrospective dedicated to the performer who receives the IMAIE Acting Award (Sophia Loren), to the follow-up to the Actors Studio retrospective that began last year (the two retrospectives make up EXTRA/The Actor’s Craft); and takes in both the latest developments in advanced television (like the new Fox pilor for the crime movie all’italiana) and the premiere of the new film event Diari di Piazza Vittorio, once more an exciting blend of cinema and live music.

A multi-faceted and genre-blending section of the RomeFilmFest, EXTRA is the place where cinephiles can meet Francis Ford Coppola or Terrence Malick in person, or enter a theater only to find a screening of material retrieved from that endless ocean that is internet (cinema as well as the Web), and presented to the filmgoing public. Visitors to EXTRA can take part in a symposium where leading experts show Totò’s best-loved film sequences, or let the avant-garde sounds and images of the video art program carry them away. In addition, EXTRA hosts all the films from the Actors Studio’s golden age, up to the masterpieces of the 1970s (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home), but also European and world premiers of the only traditional film genre that is currently expanding, and in fascinating directions: the documentary.

In a word, EXTRA provides cinema’s ‘special contents,’ at a time when the seventh art is more fragmented than ever before, a veritable explosion of reflections which zoom and flash in that darkened media theater that fuses old and new into ever more complex and protean forms.