DOKU.ARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
10.09.–12.10.2014
La guerra dei vulcani
One fine day the Italian director Robert Rossellini received a letter from the leading Hollywood film actress Ingrid Bergman, asking whether there might be any chance of acting in one of his upcoming projects. An innocent request in its way. Rossellini arranged to meet the star and they hit it off on all levels. There was only one problem. Rossellini was currently living with Italy’s most famous screen actress, Anna Magnani.
The scene was set for a titanic battle of wills. Rossellini’s next announced project, with Bergman in the lead role, was a melodrama set on the island of Stromboli. In revenge, Anna Magnani announced a similar plan, under the tutelage of the American director William Dieterle, on the neighbouring island of Vulcano. Francesco Patierno’s documentary ingeniously uses footage from both movies to reconstruct the passionate scandal that followed, which for a short time held all of Italy in its grip.
Francesco Patierno
Francesco Patierno was born in Naples in 1964. He studied architecture and became art director in an advertising agency in Rome. He worked as a production designer and director for RAI television and then he began to work on documentaries, music videos and commercials. Eager to emerge from a creative and personal point of view, he signs his first short film That Day (1996), presented in many international events. In 2010 Francesco returned to the cinema with the film Things of the Other World, loosely inspired by the film A Day without a Mexican (2004) by Sergio Arau.