The RomeFilmFest will collaborate with the Film Foundation during the forthcoming years aiming at the restoration of motion pictures which will be subsequently performed at the Festival. The Film Foundation, directed by Martin Scorsese and a prestigious board of filmmakers, such as Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Curtis Hanson, Peter Jackson, Ang Lee, George Lucas, Alexander Payne, Sidney Pollack, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg, is the first nonprofit organization devoted to film preservation in the United States. Through a significant investment each year, the foundation works on the preservation and restoration of films, among which there are Hollywood features as well as independent and avant-garde pictures, documentaries and silent movies.

Apart from introducing his latest movie, The Departed, Martin Scorsese will attend the RomeFilmFest to present this partnership on October the 15th. “A Film Festival in Rome seems a natural evolution. I feel moved by this collaboration with the RomeFilmFest, the very first film festival that really intends to finance film restoration”, has pointed out Scorsese. The American filmmaker will talk about this and his movies in a public meeting on Sunday the 15th at 3 pm. Sequences from his films, selected by himself together with Mario Sesti, will be commented by the director. The 18th at 4 pm, the screening of the film Of Mice and Men (1939, Lewis Milestone) will take place. This film has been restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, financed by the Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Prior to this restoration, Of Mice and Men was only shown in its black and white version. Due to a research requested by Scorsese, it has been discovered that the actual film is sepia-colored, an effect that reflects the rural setting of John Steinbeck´s story, upon which the film is based. This restored version brings back Lewis Milestone´s original project and will be performed for the very first time at the RomeFilmFest. “I have always been deeply fascinated by films whose main characters hold strong links between them, like brothers, and this Milestone´s movie is one of my favorites.” Thanks to the collaboration between the Film Foundation and the RomeFilmFest, the latter´s investments will be employed to restore to a particularly damaged movie each year, which will be later on screened at the festival. The Film Foundation will choose the projects and will work together with the RomeFilmFest to make sure that the films are viewed by as wide the audience as possible.