Rome is busily preparing a major new film festival for 2006 and billing it as a cinema event which will rival long-established festivals in Venice, Berlin and Cannes.
The event, which has a budget of nine million euros, will take place October 13-21 and feature around 80 movies, divided between five sections, according to details just announced.
"I hope to see exciting films, the sort which leave a mark that stays with you for the rest of your life," said Mayor Walter Veltroni, a film buff and the driving force behind the festival's creation.
Veltroni says the event will be tailored to the public more than the film industry and, in line with this principle, will "involve the entire city."
The competition jury, for example, will be made up of 50 ordinary cinema-goers, guided by an expert chair person. After sizing up 14 previously unscreened flicks by upcoming international directors, they will adjudicate three awards - best film, best actor and best actress, each worth 200,000 euros to the winner. Veteran filmmaker Ettore Scola said this element will help give the festival a distinctive character and ensure it does not tread on the toes of its compatriot in Venice, the world's oldest film festival.
"The Rome event will not be competing with Venice because it does not have a professional jury and has no presumptions about discovering new cinema," said Scola, whose works include the 1974 classic C'eravamo Tanto Amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much).
"But by entering into the soul of the people, it will be useful to them, to Rome and to the cinema." There will be no shortage of glamour at the new festival though. Seven films by top international directors will be screened for the first time in the Premiere section and Roberto De Niro is among the A-list movie stars expected to attend the debut edition.
Italian actress Monica Bellucci is one of the event's sponsors.
Bellucci stars in a video that will be used to promote the festival around the world in coming months. "Let's take great cinema back to the capital," she says in the film. There will be three other sections: Alice in the City, devoted to cinema for children and teenagers; The Actor's Craft, a retrospective of the work of a great living actor; and Extra, which will be for experimental films and documentaries, as well as 'auteur' television and other forms of media like videogames.
Veltroni said the programme will contain parallel exhibitions, discussions, music and fashion shows and literary meetings too.
All this will be based at the capital's state-of-the-art Auditorium, made by world famous Italian architect Renzo Piano, who also designed the festival's logo. But there will also be events in other parts of the city, especially in Via Veneto and at the Trevi Fountain, both of which feature prominently in Federico Fellini's masterpiece, La Dolce Vita.
"The very locations that turned Rome into one of the legends of world cinema," said Veltroni. "The Rome Film Festival springs from this city's great love of cinema. It's a festival dedicated to those who love cinema and also to those who want to discover it and are ready to venture into its endless magic."
