NEW YORK, NY.- Renewing a historic partnership, Film Forum, Cinecittà and the Italian Ministry of Culture present ROSSELLINI 120, a three-week retrospective of the great filmmaker Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977), on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of his birth, running from November 20 through December 10 at Film Forum. The 25 films in the festival include new 4K restorations from Cinecittà and eleven 35mm prints from their library in Rome, imported especially for the festival.

The director’s daughter Isabella Rossellini will introduce two opening night screenings of VOYAGE TO ITALY, starring her mother Ingrid Bergman, along with MY DAD IS 100 YEARS OLD, directed by Guy Maddin, written by Ms. Rossellini, and will appear again on November 26 (Thanksgiving) to introduce THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS and EUROPA ‘51. Ms. Rossellini and her twin sister Ingrid will introduce ROME, OPEN CITY on Saturday, November 21.

Roberto Rossellini entered Italy’s film industry as a sound effects man before becoming a screenwriter. Summing up his time writing for others, Rossellini declared, “I was their slave.” He maintained his disdain for scripts in a career that swerved between fiction and documentary, cinema and television, present-day reality and the lessons of history.

Rossellini’s breakthrough came with ROME, OPEN CITY, the film that revitalized Italy’s battered industry, brought a new frankness to the screen, introduced moviegoers around the world to the legendary Anna Magnani, and helped prove that international films could be big box office in U.S. arthouses. His next two films, PAISAN and GERMANY YEAR ZERO, became classics of “Neorealism” in their own right. Rossellini’s iconoclasm would later prompt François Truffaut to famously cite him as the father of the French New Wave as well.

Following his neorealist trilogy, Rossellini moved on to L’AMORE, a two-part film starring both Magnani and OPEN CITY co-screenwriter Federico Fellini, the latter in a controversial episode (“Il Miracolo”) that spurred a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case; the dark satire THE MACHINE TO KILL BAD PEOPLE; and THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS, a loose biographical film of Saint Francis of Assisi.

After receiving a fan letter from Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini cast her in his next film, STROMBOLI, a visceral character study shot on location on the Sicilian island. The film’s artistry was overshadowed by the tabloid-fueled scandal provoked by Rossellini’s affair with Bergman and their protracted divorces. The couple made four more features together: EUROPE ‘51, FEAR, JOAN OF ARC AT THE STAKE and the masterpiece of the collaboration, VOYAGE TO ITALY. A new 4K restoration of the latter by Cinecittà labs will have its New York premiere as part of the Rossellini retrospective.

“I have never been able to do what I wanted to do from beginning to end,” Rossellini once lamented in an interview. “In cinema, my desire to speculate has been stronger than my desire for survival.” Rossellini actually wound up doing both, speculating and surviving, crafting a body of work that evolved alongside an industry whose assembly-line method he so vehemently rejected. Tossed together, shakily financed, and often refined during shooting to conform to an obscure plan Rossellini kept in his own head, the films retain a sense of dangerous spontaneity.

Manuela Cacciamani, CEO of Cinecittà states, “Film Forum has long been one of New York’s most beloved homes for repertory cinema, a place where generations of audiences have discovered the great masters of world film. It is the ideal setting for the work of Roberto Rossellini, who changed the language of cinema and whose films continue to speak powerfully to our present. Cinecittà has held the rights to ten of his most representative films for thirty years, restored in our own laboratories and preserved in valuable 35mm prints, which we are delighted to make exceptionally available for this occasion, that follows the steps of many joint past initiatives, like the legendary 1993 TUTTO FELLINI. We thank our U.S. partners Janus Films and The Criterion Collection for their care in distributing Rossellini’s legacy through the years”.

Says Isabella Rossellini, daughter of the director, “Our family is coming en masse to see the retrospective at Film Forum. It's an occasion for my sister Ingrid and I to show the films to the youngest family members, who never met their Nonno (grandfather) or bisnonno (great-grandfather), in the 120th year since his birth. We're super-grateful to both Film Forum and Cinecittà, who for years have restored and presented our father’s work. His films continue to inspire filmmakers all around the world."

ROSSELLINI 120 has been programmed by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s Founding Repertory Artistic Director.

For Cinecittà: Restorations and film processing supervision by Paola Ruggiero. Event conception and production by Camilla Cormanni.

Text by Kyle Westphal.