With the opening on Friday of the Rome Film Festival, the Italian capital has transformed into a city of all things cinematic for 11 days.
One of the longest red carpets in the world paves the way to the main venue of the festival: the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a spectacular arts complex designed by architect Renzo Piano. Meanwhile, famous Roman locations such as the Via Veneto and Villa Borghese play host to The Business Street (an international film market) and the New Cinema Network (a co-production market for independent filmmakers).
This is the seventh edition of the festival but for its new artistic director, Marco Mueller, it's "edition number zero", as he jokingly states. Officially appointed in May, he has had little time to re-shape the event. It used to focus on big names but it was not looked upon as a major festival. The aim now is to attract the cinema market to the capital.
Mueller stresses the variety of this year's programme. It features 59 world premiering works by emerging filmmakers along with masters of popular cinema.
Two new sections have been created. The competitive Prospettive Italia presents new directions in Italian cinema and CinemaXXI, a mixed selection of in-competition and out-of-competition films, covers new trends in world cinema. Among the CinemaXXI programme for this year are the latest works of Peter Greenaway (Goltzius and the Pelican Company), Paul Verhoeven (Tricked) and Mike Figgis (Suspension of Disbelief).
Expectations are high too for the main international competition section with 14 world premiering titles already announced to compete for the Golden Marc'Aurelio, the main prize of the festival. The inclusion of Feng Xiaogang's Back to 1942, a drama about a devastating famine that struck China 70 years ago whose cast includes Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins, was announced earlier this week as a late entry for a programme that also includes films by Takashi Miike (Lesson of the Evil), Jacques Doillon (You, Me and Us) and Francis Ford Coppola's son, Roman (A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III).