Movie Screening
The film is a journey into childhood, led by the voices of thirty-nine children who were asked questions by the director about their future plans and dreams, love, passions, religion, crises, family and homosexuality. A Q & A session, with the participation of director Walter Veltroni, will be introduced and moderated by Sebastian Rotella, senior reporter at ProPublica.
H.E. Claudio Bisogniero, Ambassador of Italy to the United States, will give welcoming remarks. The director uses quotes from The Little Prince by Saint Exupéry to comment on his documentary: “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them”. Saint Exupéry knew the truth about life as well as the ways and secrets to speaking to the heart, to the imagination, to the minds of children. In the 1960s, if you wandered around the streets of Italy, one in every four inhabitants, was a child, aged between zero and fourteen. Now there’s one per every eight, half as many. A country with a low birth rate is a country with less imagination, less time for play, and less optimism. Veltroni explains that he tried to build a picture of the present-day through the voices of children. “Children are not these strange creatures with whom you need to use that falsely sympathetic tone of voice that adults use to communicate with them. Children have their own world, their own point of view, a wonderful sincerity. This film shows how our children, aged between eight and thirteen, observe and judge Italy, their lives, grown-ups, and the future”.
LOCATION Embassy of Italy – Auditorium 3000 Whitehaven Street NW Washington, DC 20008
WALTER VELTRONI
Walter Veltroni was born in Rome in 1955. He is a writer, movie director and former politician. His father, Vittorio Veltroni, an eminent RAI manager in the 1950s, died only one year later. His mother, Ivanka Kotnik, was the daughter of Ciril Kotnik, a Yugoslav diplomat at the Holy See who helped numerous Jews and antifascists to escape Nazi persecution after 1943. He served as Minister of Culture and Vice Premier from 1996 to 1998 and as Mayor of Rome from 2001 to 2008. Veltroni was elected as the first leader of the newly founded Democratic Party from 2007 to 2009.
SEBASTIAN ROTELLA
Sebastian Rotella is an award-winning author, foreign correspondent and investigative journalist. His books include the novel The Convert’s Song, published in 2014, and Triple Crossing, which was named favorite debut crime novel and favorite action thriller of 2011 by the New York Times. He is a senior reporter based in Washington, D.C. for ProPublica, an investigative newsroom dedicated to journalism in the public interest. He previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, serving as bureau chief in Paris and Buenos Aires and as correspondent at the Mexican border. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2006. His work from around the world has won honors including a Peabody Award; Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Award for coverage of Latin America; the German Marshall Fund’s Weitz Prize for excellence on reporting on European affairs; awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Inter American Press Association; and the Urbino Press Award of Italy. He was correspondent and narrator for “A Perfect Terrorist,” a documentary on Frontline PBS that received an Emmy nomination in 2011.