Open Roads: New Italian Cinema
June 4-11, 2009

Now in its ninth year, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema has become one of the tent poles of the Walter Reade Theater calendar. We’ve delighted in watching both the progress and development of a new generation of filmmakers and the growing interest in new Italian cinema for our audience. The past year has been especially rewarding, with the great international success of Silvio Soldini (Days and Clouds), Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah), and Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo), all veterans of Film Society programs. In addition, Ferzan Ozpetek, an Open Roads regular with four films premiered here, received a wonderful mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and returns to Open Roads this year with A Perfect Day.
This year’s Open Roads adds a number of exciting new debut directors to this list. Marco Amenta offers a remarkable portrait of courage in The Sicilian Girl, while screenwriters turned directors Dino and Filippo Gentili present a genre-bending comedy/noir/thriller, I Am Alive. Among the returning Open Roads veterans are Edoardo Winspeare (Brave Men), Daniele Vicari (The Past is a Foreign Land), Mimmo Calopresti (The Germans’ Factory), and Gabriele Salvatores (As God Commands). Veteran director Pupi Avati offers his finest film in years, Giovanna’s Father, and, as a very special feature of this year's Open Roads slate, Italian rock star Jovanotti will introduce a tribute to the great Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André, whose death from cancer in 1999 robbed the world of a great artist much too soon.
This series has been organized by The Film Society of Lincoln Center together with the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivitá Culturali (Direzione Generale per il Cinema), Cinecittà Luce-Filmitalia.