1914. While Jean Mordant is in the United States and is winning the world title of free struggle, his daughter Mimi, who stayed home in Belgium, is raped by German soldiers. Jean swears to avenge her, and enrolls in the famous ACM, the first armored division of history, embarking on an odyssey to return to her.
A folk trio, violin/guitar/voice, a sheep drawn on the cover of a music album, a bit of money and a whole country to cross to go home, from Maratea to Genoa. Six innovative, open and hospitable farms. Six stages of a musical-rural tour through Italy, its campaigns and its people. Back to the Land!
The opening night 2017 is the opportunity to celebrate together three important occurrences. First of all the 20 years of Detour, independent quality cinema outpost, uncompromising, since 1997 at Rione Monti, in the heart of Rome. Fifth year, for On The Road Film Festival, an overview of the best independent international cinema on trips and borders. Finally, widening the horizons, exactly one hundred years ago, the October Revolution culminated in the Winter Palace in Russia. Ten years later, Sergei Eisenstein’s epic and surreal film recreated the revolt of 1917, with deflating freedom and dissipation of forms and contents and kinematic anarchy. The joyfully anarchist celebration of the three anniversaries is entrusted to the live soundtrack by three great international musicians, improvisation masters: Mike Cooper, Alìpio Carvalho and Roberto Bellatalla.
Five editions of the arthouse festival and 20 years of our historic Rome film club. These are the main ingredients of a cultural offering which goes outside the box and definitely beyond any well-trodden tracks. 11 full length films and 12 shorts in the competition, special events and apart from the competition, national premieres: entirely dedicated to journeys and related themes, this selection by Cinema Detour, offered to the Rome audience on the occasion of our birthday, is unforgettable. We open on 5th November with an evening event, celebrating 100 years since the Russian Revolution and the first 20 years of Detour, with the film October directed by Sergej Ėjzenštejn (1928) with a live musical accompaniment. The silent film Alice in Wonderland directed by W. W. Young in 1915 and accompanied by a soundtrack will be the closing film on the 26th November, before the final prize giving.
Through Alejandro Jodorowsky’s autobiographical lens, Endless Poetry narrates the years of the Chilean artist’s youth during which he liberated himself from all of his former limitations, from his family, and was introduced into the foremost bohemian artistic circle of 1940s Chile where he met Enrique Lihn, Stella Díaz Varín, Nicanor Parra… at the time promising young but unknown artists who would later become the titans of twentieth-century Hispanic literature. He grew inspired by the beauty of existence alongside these beings, exploring life together, authentically and freely. A tribute to Chile’s artistic heritage, Endless Poetry is also an ode to the quest for beauty and inner truth, as a universal force capable of changing one’s life forever, written by a man who has dedicated his life and career to creating spiritual and artistic awareness across the globe.
Through Alejandro Jodorowsky’s autobiographical lens, Endless Poetry narrates the years of the Chilean artist’s youth during which he liberated himself from all of his former limitations, from his family, and was introduced into the foremost bohemian artistic circle of 1940s Chile where he met Enrique Lihn, Stella Díaz Varín, Nicanor Parra… at the time promising young but unknown artists who would later become the titans of twentieth-century Hispanic literature. He grew inspired by the beauty of existence alongside these beings, exploring life together, authentically and freely. A tribute to Chile’s artistic heritage, Endless Poetry is also an ode to the quest for beauty and inner truth, as a universal force capable of changing one’s life forever, written by a man who has dedicated his life and career to creating spiritual and artistic awareness across the globe.
Janis Joplin is one of the most revered and iconic rock & roll singers of all time, a tragic and misunderstood figure who thrilled millions of listeners and blazed new creative trails before her death October 4th 1970 at age 27. This in depth examination presents an intimate and insightful portrait of a complicated, driven, and often beleaguered artist.
I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for.
OTRFF 2017 City Premiere – English o.v. with Italian subtitles. In the midst of a dazzling and prolific career at the forefront of modern jazz innovation, Miles Davis virtually disappears from public view for a period of five years in the late 1970s. Alone and holed up in his home, he is beset by chronic pain from a deteriorating hip, his musical voice stifled and numbed by drugs and pain medications, his mind haunted by unsettling ghosts from the past. “MILES AHEAD is not just about the music. It’s about what we all face at one time or another in our lives; questions about who we really are, what we have to say and how will we say it. How will we ultimately be defined and who gets to say so?”
A reclusive Bulgarian railway trackman finds millions of cash spilled on the tracks and turns them in to the police. When the transport ministry’s head of PR Julia Staikova decides to use him as a diversion from a corruption scandal, his simple life falls victim to the grinder of bureaucracy.