Posts Tagged ‘Rome film festival’

The Opera! (2024) Rome Film Festival 2024

Dirs: Davide Livermore, Paolo Gap Cucco | Cast: Valentino Buzza, Mariam Battistelli, Vincent Cassel, Fanny Ardant, Caterina Murino, Rossi De Palma, Angela Finocchiaro | Italy 106′

Fans of opera will adore this cinematic hybrid opera imagination of Orpheus et Eurydice. The film is inspired by the Greek tragedy with music originally created by the bohemian composer Gluck. A high-profile cast fused the world of film and opera: Vincent Cassel, Caterina Murino, Fannie Ardant, Rossy de Palma and award-winning Italian soprano Mariam Battistelli.

This new creation from stage director Davide Livermore and creative director Paolo Gep Cucco, also contains instantly recognisable arias from Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Mozart, Vivaldi, Band with pop classics such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power Of Love thrown in for new audiences.

Premiering at this year’s Rome Film Festival the film really dazzles as a piece of entertainment, even if you’re not keen on opera. Cucco created the recent production of Aida, the first opera in the world exclusively made up of video scenes, that played at the Sydney Opera House.

This film was shot in Prodea Led Studios in Turin and is one of the first on-set virtual production. LED panels are used as a backdrop for a set on which video or computer-generated imagery can be displayed. It’s a new departure for filmed entertainment and certainly works well for this kind of production offering audiences the chance to experience the colour, vibrancy and musical clout of opera without the exorbitant prices.

The Opera! Is also one of the acclaimed fashion house collaborations. Dolce&Gabbana created the costumes: Fanny ardent looks resplendent in a white suit, with a black moon glowing against a burnished copper background. Other fashion collaborations include Bad Lurhmann’s Romeo and Juliette: the Montegues were kitted out in Prada and the Capulets in D&G for the respective houses. Almodovar’s recent Strange Way of Life was costumed by Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Not forgetting, of course, Giorgio Armani’s slick suits in Paul Schrader’s 1980 classic American Gigolo. @MeredithTaylor

THE OPERA! World premiered at the recent ROME FILM FESTIVAL 2024

 

 

Eternal Visionary (2024) Rome Film Festival 2024

Dir: Michele Placido | 
Cast: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Federica Luna Vincenti, Giancarlo Commare, Aurora Giovinazzo, Michelangelo Placido, Ute Lemper | Italy, Drama

Ute Lemper, Fabrizio Bentivoglio and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi star in this lyrical classically styled biopic about Avantgarde Sicilian maestro Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936).

Antonietta Portulano, his wife, suffered poor mental health despite outliving him for several decades in an asylum. His turbulent family relationships and controversial stance on fascism were also a constant cause of conflict and sadness throughout his career, and his desperate love for a young actress and muse Marta Abba tantalised him until his dying day.

Reflecting back over his life the film opens in 1934 on a train to Stockholm to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature. In Fabrizio Bentivoglio’s soulful turn Pirandello comes across as philosophical and wistful in reminiscing over the many colourful and inspirational personalities he had occasion to work with. And these sequences are evocative of the past in Michele D’Attansio’s assured camerawork lifting the film into another dimension as it moves seamlessly from Sicily to Berlin, Rome, America and beyond.

The drama really gets into the spirit of Pirandello’s wild imagination with ‘staged’ excerpts from his theatre pieces in Italy, and Germany during the Weimar years. The ghosts of an entire existence pass before his eyes: the stormy bond with his children who clearly felt diminished by his genius and the public scandal caused by the subversive nature of his stage productions.

Pirandello never rages but simply looks back with sorrow as he reflects on his emotional world. He was clearly an artist of great humanity with his passions, his obsessions and his most intimate existence trapped between his explosive and impossible love for Marta and his tormented relationship with his wife Antonietta’s painful illness. Once again we witness how unhappiness can be transformed into creativity and a source of comfort for the Artist  @MeredithTaylor

SCREENING AT ROME FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | 16-27 OCTOBER 2024

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