The San Diego Italian Film Festival is one of the youngest festivals in town but it keeps digging back into Italy’s rich cinema history for film events. Tonight you can enjoy Roberto Rossellini’s 1959 film “Il Generale della Rovere” at the UltraStar Flower Hill at 7:30pm. The film will also play March 24 at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park.
Here’s an excerpt from Clarissa Clo’s preview of the film: “With Il Generale della Rovere, Roberto Rossellini returned to the themes of Nazi occupation and Italian Resistance during WWII that he had treated in his war trilogy of a decade earlier with Roma Città Aperta (Open City 1945), Pasià (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1947), recently released by Criterion Collection. Despite the acclaim for Open City, which depicted the resilience of the Italian population and the partisans’ resistance in the face of a cruel and inhuman enemy, none of the other films the director made in the subsequent years enjoyed much public success. Rossellini was interested in experimenting with the cinematic medium and with the newly emerging television, an interest that brought him as far as India, and had distanced himself considerably from his earlier themes.”
The film is in Italian with English subtitles.
