pre-opening dedicated to Gina Lollobrigida

It will be dedicated Gina Lollobrigida Pre-opening Venice Film Festival 2023 which will take place on Tuesday, August 29, 2023, at 21:00 in the Darsena hall on the Venice waterfront.
The tribute to the great Italian actress, who died last January at the age of 95, consists of a double program: in fact, there will be world premieres of restored versions of the film. Portrait of Gina by Orson Welles and “The Province” by Mario Soldati.
Two films are part of the program. Venetian classic

of 80. The exhibition is part of a general project of initiatives dedicated to the great actress, conceived by the Deputy Minister of Culture Lucia Borgonzoni and the President of Cinecittà Chiara Sbarigia. The project, which also includes two ongoing photography exhibitions in Rome and Venice and an award for young talent to be presented during the Venice Film Festival.
Portrait of Gina (1958), presented as a world premiere in collaboration with Cinecittà, in a version restored for the occasion by the Film Museum in Munich, is the pilot episode of a never-completed ABC television series about “people and places” with the great Welles. as a guide. Long thought to be lost, this interview features Welles interviewing Gina Lollobrigida at her villa on Appia Antica. The film remained unreleased until 1986, when it was shown at the Venice Film Festival, a year after the director’s death. “It’s not really a documentary at all,” Welles said in 1958, “more of an essay, a personal essay. It doesn’t try to be factual, but it just doesn’t lie, in the tradition of diaries. These are my thoughts on this subject, Lollobrigida, and not on what it actually is. And it’s also much more personal than my point of view. He is a real sage.”
Provincial (1953), presented as a world premiere in a version restored for the occasion by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale in collaboration with Compass Film, is a women’s literary drama based on the novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia and written by Soldati himself. As the main character Gemma, Gina Lollobrigida gives one of the best performances of her career. To restore the scene, the original negative was used, supplemented by duplicates of some missing or damaged frames. The soundtrack is a positive two-way soundtrack, preserved in the archives of the Cineteca Nazionale.