Free public screening of 'Rome, Open City'

Date: 22 September 2015 Time: 7.00 pm

Victoria University of Wellington's Film, History and Italian Programmes, with the support of City Gallery Wellington and the Embassy of Italy, invite you to a screening of Roberto Rossellini's neorealist masterpiece Rome, Open City, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of its first release. This event is part of Victoria's '1945-2015: Legacies of Loss and Liberation Seminar Series'.

Otto Preminger said that the history of cinema is divided into two eras: one before and one after Rome, Open City. At once raw and polished, classical and revolutionary, conservative and progressive, universal and firmly rooted in its time and place, Rome, Open City is both the paradigm of Italian Neorealism and perhaps the least 'neorealist' of its works. Shot while the war still raged, and set in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of Rome, the film chronicles the life of Pina (Anna Magnani) and the ordinary Romans of her working class tenement in their struggle for survival and resistance. Constantly beset by tragedy, they are unmistakably suffused with the hopes and urgency of the Liberation. Rossellini's work remains today a unique depiction of an occupied city: a film charged with an uncompromising yet deep-seated empathy that has ensured its enduring global legacy.

To reflect on the film's legacy seventy years after the end of World War Two, the screening will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A, featuring New Zealand filmmaker Stuart McKenzie, and Victoria University's Claudia Bernardi (Italian), Thierry Jutel and Alfio Leotta (Film), and Giacomo Lichtner (History).

The event is free and open to the public, but spaces are limited.

Contact: giacomo.lichtner@vuw.ac.nz, or phone 04 463 6756.