.svg)
Content language:
As producer for master filmmakers of the caliber of Federico Fellini, Lina Wertmüller, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola, but also as assistant director (for his father Roberto and, among others, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol) and director in his own right, Renzo Rossellini has never ceased his quest to pass on his knowledge of the cinema, teaching generations of students and cineastes with passion and commitment. He will now be the next recipient of the Locarno Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which acknowledges the contribution made over an intense career devoted to the Seventh Art.
Artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, Giona A. Nazzaro: “Film is a tool for learning about the world: Renzo Rossellini has taught that lesson unstintingly, becoming a pivotal figure in modern cinema. His own love of film came from his family and has stayed with him throughout his life. Gifted with infallible instincts and led by his passion, he has left a deep and lasting mark. Today, celebrating a man of the cinema such as Renzo Rossellini is a way of paying tribute to what is most dear to us in the cinema itself.”
Renzo Rossellini will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award on Thursday 10 August in Piazza Grande. Marking the career award, the evening’s program will include one of the landmark titles of his work producing films by directors who revolutionized cinema history:
La città delle donne (City of Women), Federico Fellini – Italy – 1980 – Piazza Grande Second Screening
On Friday 11 August, Renzo Rossellini will also meet the Locarno Festival audience in a panel conversation at the Forum @Spazio Cinema.
The Lifetime Achievement Award was created in 2011. Previous winners have included leading figures from the movie-making world such as Harrison Ford (2011), Alain Delon (2012), Jacqueline Bisset (2013), Harvey Keitel (2016), Dario Argento (2021), and, in 2022, Matt Dillon.
Please find here more information and the latest news on the 76th Locarno Film Festival.
Renzo Rossellini was born in Rome in 1941, the son of Roberto Rossellini and Marcella De Marchis. He studied history and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, later working in France as assistant director to François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. He then began a collaboration with his father Roberto, initially as assistant director and later as producer, which lasted till 1977. He directed one episode of the film L'amour à vingt ans (Love at Twenty, Shintarô Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Renzo Rossellini, François Truffaut, Andrzej Wajda, 1962) and, for television, part of L'età del ferro (1964) and all twelve hours of La lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza (1970). He later founded and led two production concerns, Gaumont Italia and Artisti Associati SpA, producing, financing and distributing over one hundred films, including features by Federico Fellini (Prova d’orchestra [Orchestra Rehearsal], 1978; La città delle donne [City of Women], 1980; E la nave va [And the Ship Sails On], 1983), Michelangelo Antonioni (Identificazione di una donna [Identification of a Woman], 1982), Liliana Cavani (La pelle [The Skin], 1981), Joseph Losey (Don Giovanni, 1979), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Querelle, 1982), Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, 1982) and Francis Ford Coppola (The Cotton Club, 1984). He taught film production at Rome’s NUCT film school, and history of European cinema at UCLA, at the State University in Salerno and at the Federico II University in Naples. For some years now he has also been teaching at EICTV in Cuba. Rossellini himself set up and directed the Gaumont Film School and a Film School for the European Community, whose alumni include directors Daniele Luchetti, Giuseppe Piccioni, Antonello Grimaldi and Valerio Jalongo, and producers such as Domenico Procacci.