PREVIEW: Rome film festival to fly home flag

By Peter Mayer Oct 21, 2008, 5:07 GMT

Rome - There's a decidedly Italian flavour to this year's International Rome Film Festival - the third time the event is being held, but the first under the city's new, centre-right mayor.

Before his election in April, Gianni Alemanno campaigned on a ticket which included a pledge to sweep the Festival's red carpet clean of 'self-promoting American celebrities.'

Alemanno's predecessor, the centre-left's Walter Veltroni, first launched the festival in 2006 as a 'big party' aimed at attracting show-biz stars while reviving the city's image as a cinema capital.

The tens of thousands of tickets sold for screenings at the festival's Auditorium venue, appeared to validate Veltroni's claim that his brainchild was a success.

The festival also managed to draw big Hollywood names, including Godfather director, Francis Ford Coppola, who last year chose Rome to premiere his first film in over a decade.

But after taking over town hall, Alemanno - a former youth leader of a neo-Fascist party, who says he has renounced his extremist past - supervised the replacement of the festival's chief organizer, Goffredo Bettini, with his preferred choice, veteran film critic, Gian Luigi Rondi.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the selection for this year's edition appears to reflect the mayor's patriotic tastes.

An Italian love drama, L'Uomo che Ama, starring the glamourous Monica Bellucci, kicks off proceedings and the final screening is another home-made effort, L'Ultimo di Pulcinella.

Of the 20 films competing for the festival's Golden Marco Aurelio top prize, five are Italian.

Still, foreign talent is hardly absent from the more than 200 films on show, including 8, a United Nations-backed movie on poverty which features India's Mira Nair, Mauritania's Abderrahmane Sissako and Germany's Wim Wenders among the contributing directors.

And Hollywood is also present, with amongst others, Gavin O'Connor's Pride and Glory, a film about a New York police family, starring Edward Norton, Colin Farrell and Jon Voight.

French actress Isabelle Huppert heads the cast of Cambodian director Rithy Panh's The Sea Wall, which is also in competition along with South Korean director Zhang Lu's film Iri, and Afghanistan's Siddiq Barmak's, Opium War.

Screenings aside, the festival is to continue its tradition of involving visitors in film-themed events and celebrations.

On opening day, Scarface and Godfather-star Al Pacino is scheduled to give an audience talk and present Chinese Coffee, an unreleased film which he directs and stars in.

Veteran Italian film diva Gina Lollobrigida is set to receive the Marco Aurelio career award, while a photo exhibition will pay homage to Italian director Dino Risi who died in June.

This year the Occhio Sul Mondo (Eye on the World) section focuses on Brazilian cinema, allowing visitors to admire the 'considerable achievements made since the explosion of the Brazil's 'cinema novo' (New Cinema) movement 50 years ago,' according to festival director Rondi.

The Brazilian theme is to be further celebrated on the festival's opening day with the Be Brazilian event featuring artists, musicians and dancers at Rome's famous Piazza Navona square.