Event introduced by Gian Luca Farinelli and Isabella Rossellini
MY DAD IS 100 YEARS OLD
For the one hundredth anniversary of my father’s birth, together with Guy Maddin, I thought I might tell his story with a short film. We couldn’t imagine an actor who could play him. Then I remembered when, as a little girl, I slept in my father’s arms, and he was so soft, it felt so good. So I decided that in the film Dad would be represented as a belly that talks to me, a belly that is also Buddha’s or that of a pregnant woman or a rising moon. I thought I would ask some actor friends of mine to play the other characters, but Guy was the one who said “No, you have to play all the characters, because it will be more evident that these are your memories as a child, of what you understood of the dialogues between the adults that were guests at your house, of the discussions and even the fights”. I have always refused to play my mother and then in this film I ended up playing my father and my mother too! We also worked on the voices of the characters I play: Fellini, who dubbed all his actors, is slightly out of sync; Chaplin speaks as if he is in a silent film, with subtitles, and is a sort of angel, because my father’s generation loved him. It was while working on My Dad is 100 Years Old that I discovered that my voice as a writer is not neorealistic, but surrealistic.
DIRECTOR: Guy Maddin
NATION: Canada
YEAR: 2005
RUNTIME: 16′
CAST: Isabella Rossellini
STROMBOLI (TERRA DI DIO)
One of the most enduring lessons of this last war has been that of an aggressive egotism. For some time, I had been thinking about bringing this tragedy of the postwar era to the screen: the tragedy, after the horrors of the war itself, of this aggressive, inhuman solitude that has lost its myths. Moving the entire world inside the creature gives one the proud certainty of being able to live a life that ignores love, humility, and understanding: a life taken to the extremes, which, with a new emphasis but ancient significance, reverted to being the struggle between Creator and Creature. The main character is a woman, cynical and egotistical, who goes up against a silent, two-fold chorus: men, with their rude insensitivity, and nature, hostile, an adversary. Ignored and invisible, albeit omnipresent, is her antagonist: God. It is against Him that the lead character, in her contradictory fashion, struggles, rebelling against the chorus, ever torn between her feelings of proud insurrection and negation and those of obedient submission which the unknown voice insider her imposes from the depths of her soul. God, her antagonist, will only appear at the end, having vanquished the chorus and the main character and plunging her into the depths of her desperation, in order to break her will and invoke the light of grace that will free her from her inhuman solitude.
DIRECTOR: Roberto Rossellini
NATION: Italy, USA
YEAR: 1950
RUNTIME: 134′
CAST: Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale, Renzo Cesana, Mario Sponza
Original version with subtitles