14/10/2013 - The programme for the eighth edition was announced yesterday. Three Italian titles in competition including Guido Lombardi’s second film, as well as new films by Isabel Coixet and Nils Malmros

Marco Müller describes the eighth edition of the International Rome Film Festival (8-17 November) as “contradictory, schizophrenic, where there is everything and the opposite of everything,” adding it will be “a season of adaptations.”

“We followed no thematic line,” Müller explained when he announced the programme to the press today. “The selection was based on gut and heartfelt emotions, for a festival that is recuperating its celebration dimension, without any division between culture and market.”

Premieres are therefore not global, but there are many debut and second films, some grand events, a little comedy and much Italian cinema, including documentaries in an event that Müller imagines could become “Europe’s answer to Toronto.”

The competition includes 18 films, half of which are European. Three are Italian: Take Five [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Guido Lombardi (best debut film in 2011 in Venice with Là-bas - Educazione criminale [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guido Lombardi
film profile]), about five men caught up in a large scale robbery which transforms into a massacre game (stars include Salvatore Striano, Bruto in Caesar Must Die); I corpi estranei [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mirko Locatelli
film profile] by Mirko Locatelli, with Filippo Timi, where illness is the occasion for the meeting of two fearful souls, tackling pain; and Tir [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alberto Fasulo
film profile] by Alberto Fasulo, coproduced with Croatia, it is the story of Branko, a former Rijeka professor who became a lorry driver for an Italian firm (screenplay won the Solinas prize in 2010).

Spain is present with Isabel Coixet and her Another Me [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Isabel Coixet
film profile], a thriller with Jonathan Rhys Meyers coproduced with the United Kingdom; Denmark Sorrow and Joy [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Nils Malmros (news), the story of a love which matures going through life’s great joys and suffering; and Portuguese The Invisible Life [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Vitor Gonçalves, Romanian Quod erat demonstrandum [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andrei Gruzsniczki
interview: Andrei Gruzsniczki
film profile] by Andrei Gruzsniczki, I Am Not Him [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Tayfun Pirselimoglu (Turkey, France, Greece, Germany) and Out Of The Furnace [+see also:
trailer
making of
film profile] by American Scott Cooper (coproduced with the United Kingdom). Click here for a full list of films.

Of the 20 films out of competition, 7 are Italian: L'ultima ruota del carro by Giovanni Veronesi (the opening film – read the news); Song'e Napule by Manetti Bros, a comedy set in the Neapolitan neo-melodic world of music; La luna su Torino by Davide Ferrario, about three people for whom the 45^th parallel which goes through Turin becomes a metaphor for living a balanced life; Come il vento by Marco Simon Puccioni, with Valeria Golino, the story of Armida Miserere’s life, who directed Parma’s prison and committed suicide; La santa by Cosimo Alemà, Il venditore di medicine by Antonio Morabito and Border [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Alessio Cremonini.

French films The Scapegoat [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Nicolas Bary and Playing Dead [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Jean-Paul Salomé, Witching & Bitching [+see also:
trailer
interview: Alex de la Iglesia
film profile] by Spanish Alex De La Iglesia, Romeo and Juliet by Carlo Carlei (United Kingdom), beyond the second instalment in the American saga success story Hunger Games. The closing film will be The White Storm by Benny Chan, presented as the most spectacular Chinese film this year.

The eighth edition of the Rome Festival will include an expanded section, Cinemaxxi (which programme will be spelled out on October 23) and will dedicate an entire section to Italian documentaries called Prospettive Doc Italia (read the news story).

The programme includes two homages to great protagonists of Italian cinema, who recently passed away. The Titans Are Coming, a peplum film from 1962 with Giuliano Gemma (news), and Il processo di Verona by Carlo Lizzani (news). The career award will be given posthumously to Russian filmmaker Aleksej German, who died last February. His ambitious latest film It’s Hard being God will be screened.

(Translated from Italian)