All roads lead to Rome

Often life selections are spurred by a movie you watched or a guide you learn. In 1976, a 15-year-old Italian boy obtained attracted to India and its tradition after he watched Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. Two years later, Andrea Anastasio landed in India for a lifelong romance with Buddhist thought and J Krishnamurti’s philosophy. This week, the famous artist and director of the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre is busy giving form to a movie competition the place Delhiiites can watch “Satyajit and Sica in a single time frame to find out how they speak to the world today.” 

Italy is the nation in focus on the sixth version of the Habitat International Film Festival (HIFF), the place other than a bouquet of latest movies and a homage to Italian star Marcello Mastroianni in his centenary yr, 22 classics restored at Bologna, the centre of worldwide movie restoration work, might be screened. Under the roof of the auditorium designed by American architect Joseph Stein, the viewers can watch the restored variations of Ray’s The Apu Trilogy and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Miracle in Milan.

Alongside, Anastasio is making ready the bottom for an unprecedented exhibition of grasp Italian painter Caravaggio’s iconic work, Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, on the Centre and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in April. Currently on show in Beijing, the privately-owned paintings, valued at 50 million Euros, will make a stopover in Delhi on its manner again to Rome.

Poster of Bicycle Thieves directed by Vittorio de Sica
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“At a time when artificial intelligence is creating a parallel reality, the importance of an original artwork cannot be overstated,” says Anastasio. Like Indian philosophy, Christianity offers with the thriller of god turning into human. In each cultures, he says, faith performed an essential position in selling the humanities. “Initially, a tool to present the gospel to those who can’t read the text, during the Renaissance period, the visual artist freed himself to interpret the divinity.”

Deliberating on the dramatic flourish of sunshine and shadows in Caravaggio’s work, Anastasio says the best way he realistically makes use of mild provides the physique a sensorial dimension that was not there beforehand. A controversial determine in his timebecause of his delinquent behaviour and sexuality, an x-ray evaluation indicated Caravaggio painted Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy round 1606 when he was absconding after being charged with homicide. His artwork, nonetheless, had such a robust affect on Flemish painters and subsequent generations of artists that Anastasio describes artwork historical past as pre and post-Caravaggio.

Poster of Apur Sansar directed by Satyajit Ray
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Without the mediation of symbolism, in Caravaggio’s work, divinity is expressed by a physique from the road. “Reality is an expression of divinity in his work. The emphasis is not on the symbolic use of the body. Suffering and liberation are real in his paintings, not an idea.” The complexity of Caravaggio’s artwork, he stresses, can’t be grasped by the straightforward act of wanting on the canvas. “I would like to be there asking people what they make out of it. The emotion expressed through the face can probably have endless responses. What you make out of it depends on what that body or emotion recalls in your life. There is no direct religious reference. You only get to know by the title that she is Mary. Otherwise, she is a woman expressing both tears and delight, pain and ecstasy,” he says.

Anastasio sees works of artwork as “the best cultural ambassadors that help in bridging gaps.” With the colonial hangover waning, he says there’s a “growing demand for an ethnocentric perspective of the world” in Europe that “acknowledges the other.” “I feel there is a craving to see in real what a piece of art meant for centuries for another culture. I hope to see Chola bronzes displayed next to masterpieces in bronze from the Renaissance period in Florence.”

The Centre, together with Kiran Nadar Museum, can also be toying with the concept of making “a jugalbandi of Indian and Italian art”, with works of Twentieth-century Indian painters from Baroda and Santiniketan colleges of artwork displayed alongside Caravaggio’s iconic piece.

The choice of 70 movies from 15 nations on the HIFF additionally signifies the multiplicity of fact. It is coming at a time when the United States is speaking isolationism in geopolitics however its cinema continues to affect cinematic tastes and cultures. A current instance is Anora profitable each on the Cannes and the Academy Awards. There was a time when Italian cinema was the guiding mild with its neorealist narratives.

Andrea Anastasio, Director Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, Delhi
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“Hollywood,” says Anastasio, “is moulding the taste of the masses.”

“Cinema is a political act, and I want to protect it. If we are moving towards one taste, one genre, then it is the end. There is no problem with blockbusters, but the veracity of auteurial voices and the understanding of cinema as a tool to reveal the complexity of reality or triggering a process of imagining parallel realities is very important,” he provides.

Films like The Great Ambition, the biopic of political chief Enrico Berlinguer, who nearly led Italy’s Communist Party into energy in 1978, and Goutam Ghose’s Parikrama, the Indo-Italian manufacturing on growth politics, he factors out, counter the narrative that equates wealth with happiness. “Europe has to understand its place in a global context. There was a time when democracy was necessary for the free market. Today, It seems capitalism doesn’t need democracy anymore. It is a scary thought,” Anastasio says.

(At India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road; March 21 to March 30; 11am to 9pm; Entry is free; For full schedule go surfing to