Italiano
Umberto Eco – La biblioteca del mondo by Davide Ferrario, distributed by Fandango, will be released in Italian cinemas on Thursday March 2nd, 2023. The film was presented in the programme of the 17th Rome Film Fest.
UMBERTO ECO – LA BIBLIOTECA DEL MONDO
Director
Davide Ferrario
Nation
Italy
Year
2022
Duration
80′
Cast
Giuseppe Cederna
Niccolò Ferrero
Paolo Giangrasso
Walter Leonardi
Zoe Tavarelli
Mariella Valentini
Wandering these rooms, hallways, salons is a lover, a collector and above all a reader of books: Umberto Eco in his private library. More than 30,000 contemporary books and more than 1500 antique rare books. Fundamental books, but also curious, magical, cabalistic, bewitched. Eco devoured everything, including novels, which he swore he would never write, until that fateful year 1980 and The Name of the Rose.
COMMENTARY
Davide Ferrario, who had collaborated with Umberto Eco in 2017 on an installation on the theme of memory for the Italian pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia, reconstructs the “Professor’s” relationship with books, thanks to the collaboration of family and friends, but above all letting the protagonist himself speak, caustic, biting, profound: “The totality of libraries is the totality of humanity’s memory. Without memory we cannot plan the future”.
DAVIDE FERRARIO
Born in 1956, Ferrario was raised in Bergamo and lives in Turin. He began to work in cinema in the early 1970s as a critic and essayist. He made his debut as a director in 1989 with La fine della notte. Since then he has directed many films and documentaries which have been presented in the official selections of the most important film festivals, from Berlin to Sundance, Venice, Toronto, Locarno. He is also a novelist and photographer.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I had collaborated with Eco on a video-installation at the Biennale Arte in Venice a year before his death. Through unreleased interviews and rarely seen material, this film seeks to capture the meaning of the idea of library as the “memory of the world”, as defined by the writer and philosopher.
