2nd Cinema Rome Film Festival – News

I know today I'm posting all about festivals, but what happens is that around this time of the year new GOOD movies start to appear and well, you know I’m all about thinking about movies. So, let see what’s new in this festival that is trying to become a best among the top fests (and I believe is leaping forward very fast to become one of the best along with Cannes and Venice).

Today at 21:30 Italian time at the Art Café of Villa Borghese the awards of the New Cinema Network will be given by one of the three jurors Rossana Seregni, Simon de Santiago and Cedomir Kolar. Giorgio Assumma, SIAE president will give the award for the best Italian project and Saverio Costanzo, president of Young NCN, will give the award for the Best First Feature. So, I’ll check tomorrow to find the winners.

If you’re interested Tom Cruise and Robert Redford are in the festival today to promote Lions for Lambs, a film that also has Meryl Streep starring.

I know I must be crazy but I really want to see the Dario Argento trilogy of the Three Mothers, wish I was in Rome for this marathon that’s screened today… but then, if I was there do you think I would spend so many hours inside a movie theater?? No way, Rome has so many other most interesting things to do. Anyway, I will see this trilogy, eventually.

On October 24th Ang Lee will introduce the world premiere of the restored version of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, a joint effort between the Fondazione Cinema per Roma, Scorsese’s Film Foundation and Paramount Pictures. Martin Scorsese asked Ang Lee to represent the Film Foundation in this event, as he’s a great fan of Leone, who was the inspiration for Lee’s Oscar-winning film Brokeback Mountain. The last sentence is really news to me, no idea he was inspired on Leone’s work.

Yesterday in the Sala Teatro Studio Jane Fonda, Cloris Leachman and Shirley Knight: three doyennes of the cinema meet the public in a special edition of “A Journey Through American Cinema” curated by Antonio Monda and Mario Sesti, and dedicated to the Actors Studio: the Girls of the 70s. They had a conversation/interview about their working knowledge of the Actors Studio’s famous “Method”, their careers and their personal as well as other professional experiences. Have to say that this is a very colorful trio of actors with quite different backgrounds and experiences, so this event had to be very amusing.

On October 20th the fest reported a total of 42,000 tickets sold so far and more than one million webpage impressions –no doubt that you dearest readers (and obviously me) contributed to this last achievement. For sure the webpage impressions were increased today and will be in the next few days, as I’ll be checking all the news about this fest and sharing some interesting facts and some gossip…

Just for fun here is a photo from the red carpet premiere of Elizabeth: The Golden Age with director Shekhar Kapur, elegant Cate Blanchett and always adorable Geoffrey Rush.