The new year of the Nuovo Cinema Italiano Film Festival starts with the celebration of the centennial birthday of the world-wide acclaimed Franco Zeffirelli.
With his most versatile style, Zeffirelli directed acclaimed movies, operas and stage plays, always with a unique, distinctive and exceptional creative flourish.
Doors of the Terrace Theater on James Island will be opened at 6:00 p.m. on February 22, 2023.
Screening of the U.S. premiere 2022 documentary Franco Zeffirelli: conformista ribelle (Franco Zeffirelli: Rebel Conformist) by Anselma dell’Olio will explore Zeffirelli’s struggles, triumphs and failure in his artistic and private life that ultimately left a lasting mark on the art of cinema and stage.
As director Anselma Dell’Olio notes: “It is the first time that a documentary film has looked at the many, varied and even conflicting facets of Franco Zeffirelli’s professional career, culture and personality. I was interested in the little-known difference between the immense, singular fascination aroused by his name in the great cultural capitals of the world and the way people looked down their nose at him in Italy. With the sole exception of his operatic productions, for which he received in his country a minimal part of the honors, the respect, the glory and the veneration that surrounded him abroad. But I was even more interested in the inner life of a fervent Catholic homosexual, discreet but never hiding the fact, in a far less liberal age than the present one.”
Anselma Dell’Olio has worked with some of the greatest masters of Italian cinema: Federico Fellini, Marco Ferreri, Francesco Rosi, Mario Monicelli, Valerio Zurlini, Ennio Morricone, Elio Petri, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Mario Maldesi. She has worked as a director for several theater productions in the U.S. and for RAI, CB-Canada and CBS. She is the author of two acclaimed documentaries: Fellini degli spiriti, presented at the Cannes Film Festival, the Lumière Festival and Il cinema ritrovato in 2020, and La lucida follia di Marco Ferreri, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and was awarded the Nastro d’Argento and the David di Donatello for best documentary.
The event is co-presented by Nuovo Cinema Italiano Film Festival and the Dante Alighieri Society of Charleston.
Franco Zeffirelli: conformista ribelle
A film by Anselma Dell’Olio
February 22, 2023 – 6 p.m.
Terrace Theater – 1956d Maybank Hwy, Charleston
Free Entry
