October 21, “7 minuti” by Michele Placido and the Close Encounters with Paolo Conte and Daniel Libeskind

7 minuti by Michele Placido is the last Italian film in the Official Selection: the film will be screened today, Friday October 21^st, at 7.30 pm, in the Sala Sinopoli at the Auditorium Parco della Musica. One of the most highly considered directors, screenwriters, and actors in Italian cinema, who directed, among others, Romanzo Criminale and Vallanzasca – Gli angeli del male, Placido brings to the screen a true story that took place in France in 2012. Eleven women are offered an ambiguous job contract renewal by an international corporation that has bought the company they work for. They have only a few short hours to decide their own fate and that of three hundred women colleagues who are waiting for the verdict outside the factory.
“This is an extremely relevant issue in Europe today, in France or in Italy and everywhere else, if you think of the crisis caused recently by Great Britain’s decision to leave the European Union – explained Placido. In a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor is growing and the conflict sustained by unions and ideology is waning, personal aspects, personal needs, the ego and even desperation are now beginning to emerge”.
The cast includes some of the most popular actors in Italian cinema, such as Ambra Angiolini, Cristiana Capotondi, Fiorella Mannoia, Maria Nazionale, Violante Placido, Clemence Poesy, Sabine Timoteo, with Ottavia Piccolo and Anne Consigny. The film is inspired by the play written by Stefano Massini.
 
Two Close Encounters are scheduled for today.
At 6 pm, in collaboration with the Fondazione Musica per Roma, Paolo Conte will be the protagonist of a Close Encounter in Sala Petrassi. Defined by novelist and screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami “as one of the most important voices of poetry in our time”, Conte is a musician who plays many instruments, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a lawyer and a painter. At 5 pm in the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna, the focus will be on Daniel Libeskind, one of the leading figures in Deconstructivist Architecture. Libeskind, designer of the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin and of the project to rebuild the World Trade Center in New York – will discuss the relationship between the seventh art and architecture and his love for Paolo Sorrentino’s cinema.
 
Five films will be screened from the Official Selection.
At 10 pm, Sala Sinopoli will be the venue for the screening of The Hollars by John Krasinski: John Hollar is a New York artist forced to return to the small middle-American town he left behind when news of his mother’s illness brings him home. Back in the house he grew up in, John is immediately swept up in the problems of his dysfunctional family, his old high school rival, and an over-eager ex-girlfriend as he faces impending fatherhood with his girlfriend in New York.
At 8 pm in Sala Petrassi, the screening will feature La mujer del Animal by Victoria Gaviria: the star of the film is eighteen-year old Amparo, who is forced to live in a shanty-town on the outskirts of Medellin. The young woman is unprepared when Libardo – known to everyone as “The Animal” – becomes obsessed with her, kidnaps her, and forces her into marriage. “This film denounces The Animal publicly – explains the director. We had the courage to bring his actions out into the open, to forgo the power of subtlety so nobody could doubt how lethal he was. The viewer will be shocked, even stricken. But one question will remain. “Why don’t we do anything about it? Why don’t I do anything about it?” It’s a confusing embarrassment”.
At 10:30 pm in the same venue, in the “Everybody is Talking About It” section, the featured film will be Train to Busan, a zombie disaster-movie by filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho. As an unidentified virus sweeps across South Korea, the government declares martial law: travelers on an express train to Busan, a city that has successfully fended off the viral outbreak, must fight for their own survival.
At 6:30 pm, the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna will hold the screening of Immortality by Medhi Fard Ghaderi. “This is a film made in the space between reality and dream – stated the director. Six parallel stories are narrated consecutively in the passageways and compartments of a train, and each story is a continuation of the one before and a prelude to the one after. This 145-minute single-shot film is a continuation of my previous short long-shot films, and was inspired by the film’s dreamlike story, where the mathematical sphere of each story takes shape in the train’s straight passageways, narrated through the old man’s fluid reflections”.
La ùltima tarde by Joel Calero (at 9:30 pm in Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna) is the story of a former couple of radical leftwing militants who reunite to sign their divorce. As they catch up with their lives and revisit their shared romantic and political past, they unveil intimate secrets to finally discover who they truly are and how much their country and their beliefs still hurt them.
 
At 11 am, Studio 3 hosted Coco, a short exposé film by Veronica Succi about the world of pedophilia. The screening of Coco was followed by a debate with the director, with Don Fortunato Di Noto, founder of the Meter association which has been fighting pedophilia for many years, with journalist Antonino d’Anna and writer Eleonora Mazzoni.
Also at Studio 3, for the retrospective dedicated to Tom Hanks, the featured films will be Larry Crowne (directed by Hanks) at 6 pm, and at 9 pm, Captain Phillips by Paul Greengrass.
 
 
At the MAXXI at 5:30 pm, audiences are invited to see the latest film by Gianfranco Pannone, Lascia stare i santi (from the Riflessi section of the programme), while at 9:30 pm, the scheduled event is HITalk. At 9:30 pm, as part of the tribute to Luigi Comencini, the director’s four daughters, Paola, Cristina, Francesca and Eleonora, will be the featured guests of an encounter moderated by Mario Sesti and Giorgio Gosetti, in which stories and memories will alternate with sequences from their father’s films chosen by each one of his daughters.
 
The Casa del Cinema will host the tribute to Fritz Lang, at 6:30 pm, with the screening of M and, for the American Politics retrospective, The War Room by Donn Alan Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus (at 9 pm).
 
The retrospective dedicated to Valerio Zurlini continues at the Cinema Trevi movie theatre, curated by Domenico Monetti and Mario Sesti in collaboration with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale. At 5 pm with The Desert of the Tartars and at 8:30 pm with Gli anni delle immagini perdute by Adolfo Conti, a portrait of Valerio Zurlini as a man and as an artist.
 
“Cinema senza frontiere” is the event organized by the Rome Film Fest with the support of the Ministry for the Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, for the project “MigrArti – Cinema”, made possible by the Scuola Di Donato, the Parents’ Association of the Scuola Di Donato and Apollo 11. At 9 pm, there will be a screening of America America by Elia Kazan at the Scuola Di Donato. The film will be preceded by the short film Beles – La stagione dei fichi d’India by Massimo Ruggiero, one of the shorts that won the MigrArti project.
 
The programme of repeat screenings to be held across the city runs as follows.
Sala Sinopoli will feature the screening of Sword Master 3D by Derek Yee (at 5 pm), while the Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna will show Hell or High Water by David Mackenzie (at 3 pm). At the Cinema Village, in the Mazda Cinema Hall, the screenings will feature Kids in Love by Chris Foggin (at 10 am), My First Highway by Kevin Meul (at 2:30 pm), Florence Foster Jenkins by Stephen Frears (at 5:30 pm), 7 minuti by Michele Placido (at 8 pm) and The Hollars by John Krasinski (at 10:30 pm).
At the MAXXI, there will be a repeat screening of Al final del túnel by Rodrigo Grande (at 3 pm), while the Casa del Cinema will show Fritz Lang by Gordian Maugg (at 4:30 pm).
At the Cinema The Space Moderno, at 8:30 pm, there will be a repeat screening of Al final del túnel by Rodrigo Grande (in Sala 2), while Sala 3 will feature The Last Laugh by Ferne Pearlstein (at 6 pm), Sword Master 3D by Derek Yee (at 8 pm) and The Secret Scripture by Jim Sheridan (at 10:30 pm).
The Cinema Broadway movie theatre will feature Florence Foster Jenkins by Stephen Frears (at 5:30 pm), The Accountant by Gavin O’Connor (at 8 pm) and Sing Street by John Carney (at 10:30 pm). Finally, at the Admiral movie theatre, the screenings will feature Goodbye Berlin by Fatih Akin (at 10:30 am), Ho amici in paradiso by Fabrizio Maria Cortese (at 4:30 pm), La grande Monnezza by Chiara Bellini (at 6:30 pm), I Am Not a Serial Killer by Billy O’Brien (at 8 pm), Il più grande sogno by Michele Vannucci (at 10:30 pm).