Futuro Presente, the Festival of Contemporary Arts organised by the Department of Culture of the Autonomous Province of Trento, the Incontri Internazionali di Rovereto, Mart, Nuovo Cineforum Rovereto, Dissonanze Armoniche and the Municipality of Rovereto, pays tribute each year to a great Maestro whose research, while revolving around the axis of a well-defined artistic discipline, opens up to interrelations with the different languages of music, theatre, visual arts, dance, cinema, architecture and design.
After Merce Cunningham and Philip Glass, the focus of this year's edition is Bernardo Bertolucci, the protagonist of one of the most significant artistic experiences in the history of cinema over the last forty years. A very young debutant influenced by Pasolini's poetics, Bertolucci quickly achieved a fully autonomous stylistic signature, which was defined precisely by the intense relations established with the figurative arts, the musical tradition and literary culture. His cinema is in fact profoundly marked by his collaborations with musicians such as Ennio Morricone, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Gato Barbieri and David Byrne, by the confrontation with literary matrices that refer to Alberto Moravia, Stendhal, Jorge Louis Borges, Paul Bowles and James Lasdun, and by the dialogue with figurative traditions of great intensity (one need only recall the tributes to Francis Bacon, Ligabue, René Magritte and Pellizza da Volpedo). It is thanks to these artistic and cultural references that the extraordinary expressive density of Bertolucci's cinema, constantly oscillating between attraction for the provinces and interest in distant cultures, reconstruction of collective history and retreat into the private narrative, has been able to open up to the world to become an instrument for reading the times in which we live.
Futuro presente will offer a wide-ranging portrait of the great Italian filmmaker, whose stratified artistic experience will be retraced through the complete retrospective of his films, which will be accompanied by concerts and meetings with film experts, artists and actors who collaborated in various ways with the Maestro. Ryuichi Sakamoto will retrace the expressive textures that coloured the films The Last Emperor, Tea in the Desert and Little Buddha, Gato Barbieri will reread the main themes of Last Tango in Paris, and the Nuovo Concerto Cantoni and the Gruppo Ocarinistico Budriese will accompany the vision of the extraordinary and enveloping saga of Novecento. Paying tribute to the Maestro will again be Eva Green and Louis Garrel, two young stars of international cinematography launched precisely with The Dreamers. On the final evening, Bertolucci himself will speak about himself, and he will do so together with Marcello Garofalo, Morando Morandini, Matthew Spender, Lucilla Albano and Jacopo Quadri, some of the people closest to the intimate folds of his cinema.
A multi-level festival, therefore, capable of satisfying cinephile passion, the thirst for great musical events and the love for great cinema, that which knows how to combine authorship and spectacle. All this, in honour of one of the greatest filmmakers and men of culture of our time.
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