Poster reveal for mark cousins new film March On Rome ⭐. Don't miss your chance to attend the UK/Ireland premiere of MARCH ON ROME Belfast Film Festival BOOK HERE! 7th November Cineworld Belfast belfastfilmfestival.org/event/march-on…

Poster of my new film slightly haunting various places

Train Rome to Bologna

Have been to scores of premieres of my films, but still my heart pumps.
Tonight especially because our film about Fascism screened in former fascist building, when far right is on rise here in Italy.
Repeated reaction after: 'You went really far.'

My day

Filming for Italian TV today, as my film about Mussolini and fascism premieres tonight.
Obelisk in background is dedicated to Mussolini - still no signage today contextualising it...
Paper scroll in foreground is my film script. Cut out collage. I seldom have standard script.

Visually you never get to the end of Rome.
A literal ladder from ground to god
Bernini sculpture, bits holding fingers up still to be chipped away
Flimsiest of loin cloths
Austere plain marble to show off 625 CE mosaics above

I still don't get why people call fiction, but not documentary, films 'narrative'.
Anybody who's been in an edit suite knows that non-fiction is narrative.
And the fiction=scripted/ documentary=unscripted distinction?
Equally untrue.
Some of best scripted films ever are docs.

Searched for grave of Suso Cecchi D'amico today, great screenwriter for Visconti, Di Sica, etc (I knew her a bit).
Couldn't find it, but what a cemetery Verano in Rome is!

Rome today
Dirty toenails in Guido Reni altarpiece.
Overpainting in Caravaggio's The Fortune Teller

Wow. Sublime writing about an unbearable thing
thetimes.co.uk/article/the-he…

Rome tomorrow
First went 1986, 1 of my 1st trips abroad
Called Eternal City, yet little abt it is eternal. It almost died in middle ages (population 30,000) but in 1960s it exploded
Have walked most districts, can't wait to do more
Reading Donatella di Cesare Donatella Di Cesare
❤️

Gutted to hear of death Of Robbie Coltrane.
Highlight for me is his brilliant Dr Johnson in John Byrne's Wellesean film Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Isles.
❤️

Many here in Edinburgh are distraught by closure of Filmhouse + Edinburgh Film Festival
Some will know that La Clef cinema in Paris was occupied when threatened with closure.
Now La Clef Revival collective is in London, ICA
Wish I could be there
ica.art/la-clef-revival

Really looking forward to Belfast Film Festival next month.
I've seen and was really moved by opening film Ballywalter, directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah and starring Seána Kerslake and Patrick Kielty
See it if you can.

Imagine if #NYFF , the IFC Center, and BAM were all shut down in one day. This is the analogy that AFTERSUN director Charlotte Wells gave to describe the tragic closures in Edinburgh last week: indiewire.com/2022/10/edinbu…

mark cousins beautiful manifesto - “Festivals should be radically about joy, about countering alienation, about telling the world of money and commodity that it doesn’t know the secrets of the human heart or the inexpressible, stupendous need to be with other human beings”.

Am in Rome and Bologna all next week for Italian release of The March on Rome, about Mussolini 100 years ago, and more recent developments...