Documentaries about cinema are an important but complex genre, because they have to recount the story of a film, a director, a period, through the language of cinema – a challenge that can by no means be taken for granted. This year’s selection proposes a series of invaluable documentaries, due to both the quality and importance of the documents and their subjects. They range from the flowing and encyclopaedic The Invisible Man, a portrait of Kubrick featuring the voices of those closest to him, to Merchant/Ivory, the story of two artists who gave life to an unrepeatable body of work, capable of recounting both British and Indian culture; there are also shorter but no less intense films, such as portraits of Rohmer (revealed as no one ever managed before), Katharine Hepburn, Gene Kelly, David Lynch, Sergei Parajanov and Buster Keaton, a family portrait by the children and grandchildren of Charlie Chaplin and the fascinating Film Lesson held by Scorsese, who, for an hour, tells us about his work on the soundtracks of his films. Thanks to the work of archives we will have the opportunity to present a number of documentaries that left their mark on the history of cinema but which haven’t been accessible for some years now, such as: Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the extraordinary film about the making of Apocalypse Now, Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, about one of the most legendary theatrical shows of the last century, Camera Arabe, a portrait of a mythical generation of filmmakers to whom we would do well to listen again today, and Location Hunting in Palestine (for The Gospel According to St. Matthew), one of Pasolini’s most beautiful documentaries. We will also have a fascinating portrait of the great poet and director, killed fifty years ago this year, based on never-beforeseen interviews with friends of Pier Paolo that were recorded in the summer of 1998. But perhaps the brightest stars will be the documentaries by Márta Mészáros, François Reichenbach and Cartier-Bresson, and the discovery of what we know today to have been the first neorealist film, Pozzi-Bellini’s Il pianto delle zitelle (1939). A collection of very powerful shorts by master filmmakers who knew how to depict the reality that surrounded them, stories big and small recounted in ways that were human and unique.

Curated by Gian Luca Farinelli