John Travolta, Isabelle Huppert, Pamela Anderson and Josh Safdie will be among the honorees at the 44th Torino Film Festival, running Nov. 24 – Dec. 2 in the Piedmontese capital. Tributes will also go to Luc Besson, Fanny Ardant, Margarethe von Trotta, Stephen Frears, Mike Newell, Maria de Medeiros, Andy Garcia and Mira Sorvino. Special guests include Chiwetel Ejiofor, Abel Ferrara, Asia Argento, Albert Serra and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, each presenting new or classic work.
As per tradition, 12 career achievement awards will be presented, all shaped like the Stella della Mole, the 12-point sculpture atop Turin’s Museo Nazionale del Cinema and an emblem of both the city and the event. Travolta, among the first honorees announced, will join director Roland Joffé to open the 44th edition with the international premiere of the JFK assassination drama “November 1963.” “John Travolta is one of cinema’s great legends,” says artistic director Giulio Base. People feel he is part of their family, their history, their lives.
Few actors can claim to have altered the very culture, but the way he walked the streets of New York at the start of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ changed the way people moved. I remember how every guy tried to imitate him. That kind of influence is rare.” “Personally, I’ve loved him since I was a boy,” Base continues, recalling the “fever” around “Grease” and the near riots at its Turin premiere.
Three editions into his five-year mandate, Base has established a populist streak, encouraging guests to spend as much time as possible with local audiences and gravitating toward luminaries with proven crowd appeal. Speaking with Variety ahead of this year’s lineup announcement, he draws a throughline between honorees Mike Newell and Stephen Frears, filmmakers who “move across worlds, eras and genres with exceptional flair” while displaying “the same extraordinary ability to win over audiences.” Safdie offers a more recent example. Though the “Marty Supreme” director was unable to attend his film’s surprise screening at last year’s festival, the evening remains a touchstone for the kind of communal experience that first sparked Base’s own cinephilia, and one he now hopes to recreate.
Young guys, students, professors, talking about the movie like in the old times. It was something really special that touched people. An Italian journalist wrote me an email saying this was probably the greatest night of the festival, and I replied with a silly emoji, but later I thought he might be right!” One of Base’s signature initiatives is Zibaldone, a program that brings together restorations, tributes, special screenings and premieres under a name borrowed from poet Giacomo Leopardi’s celebrated miscellany.
Its eclectic spirit is reflected in this year’s honorees, who span arthouse figures such as von Trotta, the first woman to win the Golden Lion, and global crowd-pleasers such as Besson, whom Base calls “a French director who has conquered the world.” The lineup also embraces French cinema icons Huppert and Ardant, alongside Canadian-born pop-culture phenomenon Anderson, whose leaps from B-movies to studio comedies to contemporary auteur fare perhaps best capture the Zibaldone spirit. She had the courage to reinvent herself, surprising those who thought they already knew her. She’s an example of how to succeed and transform.” Base has himself transformed the festival with an eye toward audience accessibility, streamlining both its selection and geographical footprint.
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