Movie screening
CINEFORUM
A corrupt city councilman seeks a huge profit in a suburban real estate deal. Nottola (played by a wonderful Rod Steiger) manipulates corrupt local government officials in the political instability that plagues Italy following World War II. The only councilman who tries to block the shady deals in defense of the people is the lone Communist elected to the board. The only insight on the characters is shown by the political machinations undertaken and the final result of the new zoning laws that followed the tangle of secret deals, bribes and blackmail.
Director: Francesco Rosi
Italy/France, 1963, 101 minutes
Film in Italian with English subtitles
TRAILER (via Youtube)
DOORS OPEN AT 6:00PM AND CLOSE PROMPTLY AT 6:30PM
RSVP
Please Make a Reservation by April 08, 2015 at 2 PM
Reservations are available until we reach
capacity or by the above date/time (whichever comes
first)
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PHOTO ID REQUIRED
LOCATION
Embassy of Italy – Auditorium
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Rod Steiger is ferocious as a scheming land developer in Francesco Rosi’s Hands over the City, a blistering work of social realism and the winner of the 1963 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion. This expose of the politically driven real-estate speculation that has devastated Naples’s civilian landscape moves breathlessly from a cataclysmic building collapse to the backroom negotiations of civic leaders vying for power in a city council election, laying bare the inner workings of corruption with passion and outrage.
FRANCESCO ROSI
From All Movie Guide: Distinguished Italian director Francesco Rosi is best known for the political films he made during the 1960s. He had his start assisting Luchino Visconti on La Terra Trema in 1947. Afterward, Rosi assisted other major directors, including Michelangelo Antonioni, and collaborated on film scripts until 1952 when he helmed Red Shirts. Taking the production over from director Goffredo Alessandrini, who had just quit, it turned out to be a solid, albeit rather average beginning. In 1958, Rosi made his real directorial debut with The Challenge. He made a splash on the international circuit four years later with Salvatore Giuliano, a neorealist biography of the Sicilian bandit. Its realism combined with none-too-subtle allegations of Mafia influence over the government caused controversy in Italy. That year, the film earned a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. His next film, Hands over the City (1963), contained similar themes to Giuliano while his 1965 film The Moment of Truth was an exploitation exposé of bullfighting. By the 1970s, Rosi’s films became considerably less topical and presented more conventional views of corruption in Italy. In the ’80s, Rosi’s style and focus again changed to even less inflammatory material based on literature. Rosi wrote and directed his last film, The Truce, in 1997; he died in 2015, at age 92.
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