This year, IDFA proudly presents a retrospective of Gianfranco Rosi, the festival’s Guest of Honor. Although he made only six feature films, Rosi’s approach resulted in masterpieces that provide a unique view of society. His camera shows us how people experience their world and allows us to forget ours. Standing on the side lines of events, he observes them and does not go into polemics or explanations, but his deeply humane point of view remains clear through his unique documentary method. Read Nico Marzano’s essay about the program and explore the titles below.
Selected for the Retrospective
About 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles and 20 feet below sea level, a commune of outcasts lives in the middle of the desert. Gianfranco Rosi follows them at a suitable distance, letting the images and the people speak for themselves.
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This urgently topical film shows the intersection of two worlds: everyday life on Lampedusa, and refugees arriving full of fear and anxiety on this small European island, so deceptively close to the African coast.
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An impressionistic report from the border regions of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. In his distinctively stunning style, Gianfranco Rosi shows the people’s resilience and miseries of everyday life in a region scarred by decades of conflict and oppression.
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Rosi holed up in an invisible part of Rome: along the GRA, the freeway that loops around the city. His warmhearted, sometimes humorous portraits of lives lived in the shadow of progress won him the Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Film Festival.
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