The 8^th Rome Film Festival reaches the halfway mark: tomorrow, Tuesday November 12^th at 7:30 pm, Sala Santa Cecilia will present the screening in Competition of Out of the Furnace, the gangster movie by Scott Cooper. Following the success of Crazy Heart, winner of two Oscar® awards, the American director, screenwriter, producer and actor returns behind the camera for his second film with a star-studded cast that includes Christian Bale (winner of the Oscar® for Best Supporting Actor for The Fighter), Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker (winner of the Oscar® for Best Actor for The Last King of Scotland), Willem Defoe, Zoë Saldana and Sam Shepard. In the film, Russell Baze (played by Christian Bale) goes out in search of his brother Rodney (Casey Affleck), who disappeared mysteriously after being lured into a crime ring.

In the late evening screening (10:30 pm, Sala Santa Cecilia, Out of Competition), cult director Eli Roth gives free rein to his obsessions in The Green Inferno, the return of the Italian-style cannibal-movie. The American director – who in a few short years brought back the splatter film with Cabin Fever and the two episodes of Hostel, earning the admiration of directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Roberto Rodriguez – tells the story of a group of environmentalists whose plane crashes in the jungle, marking the beginning of a desperate struggle for survival to avoid being devoured by the cannibals.

The programme of the Competition also features the screening of two more second films in Sala Sinopoli: Quod Erat Demonstrandum by Andrei Gruzsnick (at 5:00 pm) and Foreign Bodies (I corpi estranei) by Mirko Locatelli (at 10:00 pm).

Andrei Gruzsnick, the author of The Other Irene (Cealalta Irina), the award-winning film screened at many international film festivals, and student of the master Lucian Pintilie (one of the fathers of new Romanian cinema), sets Quod Erat Demonstrandum in the mid-1980s, under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu: the protagonist is a non-conformist, who decides to publish an article without asking permission from the authorities. His gesture triggers a chain of events that will change “the lives of others”.

Foreign Bodies (I corpi estranei) marks the return as a director of Mirko Locatelli, an esteemed author and producer of documentary films, and director of The First Day of Winter (Il primo giorno d’inverno), the debut film he presented at the 65^th Venice International Film Festival. In his latest work, Locatelli deals with the drama of two men, one who must cope with his son’s illness (Filippo Timi), and the other, a Moroccan (Jaouher Brahim) who is assisting a friend. The microcosm of the hospital becomes the setting for the encounter between two lonely and frightened souls, two “foreign bodies” coping with pain, who will learn to open up to one another.

Out of Competition, at 5:00 pm in Sala Santa Cecilia, there will be a preview screening of Border by Alessio Cremonini. Following his experience as an assistant to Ettore Scola in The Dinner (La cena) and as the screenwriter of Voci by Franco Giraldi and Private by Saverio Costanzo, Border is Cremonini’s first feature-length film as a director: the movie deals with the issues of the Syrian crisis and the refugees, describing the danger-ridden journey of two young sisters forced to flee from their native country towards Turkey.

Also Out of Competition, at 7:15 pm in Sala Sinopoli, the public will have the opportunity to view the screening of a surprising detective-romance film, Playing Dead (Je fais le mort) by Jean-Paul Salomé, the director who achieved international renown for his films Belfagor – Phantom of the Louvre and Adventures of Arsene Lupin. The film, poised between comedy and thriller, is the story of Jean, an unemployed actor who gets a bizarre job offer, to help the police reconstruct crime scenes by playing the part of the dead body. Jean’s obsession for detail impresses the police inspectors and soon raises him to a delicate leading role in the investigation of a series of murders.

The programme of CinemaXXI will present, at 10:30 pm in Sala Petrassi, the screening of Love Stories (Racconti d’amore) by Elisabetta Sgarbi, one of the most original new talents of Italian cinema. The film, which describes four love stories set amidst the fog and the canals of the Po Valley, will be preceded by the short film Nato prematuro by Enzo Cei, one of Italy’s great photographers, about the treatment of a baby born prematurely in a modern Neonatology hospital ward. At the MAXXI – National Museum of XXI Century Arts, at 5:00 pm, a special session will transform the Auditorium of the MAXXI into a contemporary installation space, with works that invite the spectator to decide how long his experience will last. Two medium-length films will be screened: La imagen arde by director and visual artist Lois Patiño, winner of the prize as Best Emerging Director at Locarno, who participated in the CinemaXXI Competition last year with the successful Mountain in Shadow (Montaña en sombra), and Fade, a hypnotic work by video artist Jean-Claude Ruggirello. At 8:00 pm, they will be followed by Nepal Foreverby director and painter Aliona Polunina and Skywalker by Mingchun Gong.

The Competition of Prospettive Doc Italia, at 5:00 pm in Teatro Studio, will present the screening of the film Seaside Holidays (Vacanze al mare) by author and screenwriter Ermanno Cavazzoni, famous for novels such as “Il poema dei lunatici” (1987, which inspired Federico Fellini’s last film The Voice of the Moon (La voce della luna), on which Cavazzoni worked as a screenwriter), “Le tentazioni di Girolamo” (1991), “Vite brevi di idioti” (1994), “Cirenaica” (1999), “Gli scrittori inutili” (2002), “Storia naturale dei giganti” (2007). The documentary tells extravagant stories of Italians on summer holiday.

The retrospective “Hercules Conquers the Silver Screen” will feature the film Maciste in Hell (Maciste all’inferno) by Riccardo Freda (at 2:30 pm, Teatro Studio), while the retrospective of “Claudio Gora Director and Actor” will present the film L’incantevole nemica(Studio 3 at 5:30 pm).

Three films will be presented in the section Alice nella Città: Run, Boy, Run (Lauf, junge, lauf) by Pepe Danquart (Sala Santa Cecilia at 11:00 am),Patema Inverted by Yasuhiro Yoshiura (Sala Sinopoli at 11:30 am), Container 158by Stefano Liberti and Enrico Parenti (MAXXI, at 11:00 am).