Past screening

The Rosselinis

Directed by: Alessandro Rossellini
Runtime: 1hr 30min Year: 2020
Watch trailer

Details

Directed by: Alessandro Rossellini
Runtime: 1hr 30min Year: 2020
Country: Italy, Latvia
Topics: Personal Stories

Filmmaker Alessandro Rossellini has had a complicated family legacy to contend with for all of his life.

His grandfather is the legendary director Roberto Rossellini, “father of Neorealism”; his step-grandmother is Ingrid Bergman; his aunt is the model and actress Isabella Rossellini.

Alessandro has struggled with the pressure to live up to the family tendency to genius and beauty, and felt the long shadow cast by Roberto the patriarch’s charismatic personality and singular morality. At the age of 55, Alessandro sets out to make his first feature film, unravelling the layers of his family’s history to figure out the Rossellini dynasty and his own place in it.

Through a series of utterly memorable, funny and occasionally awkward interviews – not least with aunt Isabella, who seems to have spent a lifetime dealing with Alessandro’s issues – he creates his own Rossellini family portrait.