Jodie Foster, Sergio Castellitto, and a tantalizing preview of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian usher in the second edition of ‘Aspettando la Festa’ (‘A Foretaste of the Film Fest’), the initiative conceived by the Fondazione Cinema per Roma to bring students at Roman schools face to face with actors and filmmakers, who talk about film with them and answer their questions. Other film personalities going back to school in the months before the next Rome Film Fest (October 22^nd – 31^st, 2008) include Luisa Ranieri, Claudia Gerini, Alessandro Gassman, Claudio Santamaria, and Giovanni Veronesi, all of whom are joining the event to explain the mystery of filmmaking and share their favourite films with their young audiences.

After the remarkable success of this initiative in 2007, when Valeria Solarino, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Valerio Mastandrea talked shop at Roman schools, an encore was called for, one with an even fuller and more ambitious program. A joint effort conceived by the City of Rome’s Department of Education, the Province of Rome, the Film Fest section Alice in the City, and Ciak, the monthly film magazine, this year the event once again tours Roman classrooms and culminates in unique encounters with actors and filmmakers, as well as film critics and influential journalists such as Laura delli Colli and Alessandra de Luca. School-age film fans will be treated to talks about these film figures’ all-time favourite films, or else the Italian films they think should be saved and introduced to the younger generations.

The event gets underway on March 18^th with Sergio Castellitto, guest speaker at the Roman school Albert Einstein, who will describe his recent experiences on the very international set of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the second film based on the C.S. Lewis trilogy after The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Before the talk the film will be shown to the students – the perfect occasion for examining the fantasy genre so well-loved by young filmgoers, their curiosity already whetted by the first book in the saga, distributed to classrooms across the city in collaboration with Mondadori Ragazzi.

And thanks to the kind permission of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Italy, over the course of this film lesson Roman students will get sneak previews of a number of brand-new scenes from the sequel, which won’t come out in Italy until August 20^th, in their world premieres. Castellitto, who plays the tyrant Miraz in the film, will comment on the scenes and speak about his career as both an actor and director in Italy and abroad, and also explain just what an actor has to do on the set of an action movie.

The event continues on April 11^th at the Auditorium dell’Ara Pacis, where students will have the chance to have a live encounter with one of America’s most acclaimed actresses, winner of countless awards: Jodie Foster. Once again the theme is fantasy, since Foster will be talking about her latest film, Nim’s Island, distributed by Moviemax. The actress plays Alexandra, a world-famous writer who is also quite shy and insecure, who finds herself catapulted into a secret world inhabited by wondrous creatures – a world far lovelier than the one she portrays in her books.

On April 16^th, director and screenwriter Giovanni Veronesi pays a visit to the high school Convitto Nazionale di Roma, to share some of cinema’s secrets with the students, along with his love of comedy: he’ll be screening his favourite film, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

What inspired ‘Aspettando la Festa’ was a desire to preserve the collective memory of films, so often lost. ‘The great masterpieces directed by film legends, but also lesser-known gems,’ Piera Detassis and Gianluca Giannelli agree, ‘often appear to be light years away from the sensibility of the younger generations, when exactly the opposite is true. Film classics are a gold mine of very contemporary ideas about reality and the film medium. We wanted to bring the cinema into the classroom in a non-punitive way, without really ‘teaching’ it. It was quite a positive experience last year. That’s why this year we’ve decided to treat the kids to a preview of some of the season’s most hotly-awaited films, with the pictures’ own stars as their guides.’

Schools that have adhered to the initiative:

IT IS Albert Einstein
Convitto Nazionale
Liceo Scientifico Primo Levi
ITSCG M. Buonarroti
Liceo Ginnasio Guglielmotti
Liceo Classico Eugenio Montale