Curated by
Marco Berti and Francesca Pappalardo, Palazzo Esposizioni Roma

Promoted by
Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

Our gratitude to
Cineteca Milano, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Lucky Red, Park Circus and Tamasa Distribution
 

The Palazzo Esposizioni Roma Cinema is devoting a film retrospective to these two brilliant movie directors from Minnesota, whose highly personal outlook has influenced and renewed the cinema in recent decades. Intelligent, erudite and themselves sophisticated movie lovers, they have revisited and hybridised every classic film genre, from noir and the western to comedy and the thriller to rediscover the roots of our problematic and desolate present in the stories of the past: a portrait of America holding out little hope, interweaving the twin threads of satire and nightmare. Deforming and chilling extreme situations, occasionally laden with inconceivable violence, they level fierce criticism at the rituals of contemporary life, which can only be portrayed through the codes of the grotesque. Film after film, despite the richness of the stories told and the various different settings, the world is slowly transformed into a desolate wasteland where mankind consumes his existence in a claustrophobic, hallucinatory atmosphere. Amid kidnapping, blackmail, betrayal, vendetta and senseless violence, an army of stupid and inept characters – with the compelling features of John Turturro, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Goodman and Jeff Bridges, or the luminous gaze of Frances McDormand – seem to look out at us from the screen and to greet our uncertainties with a mocking laugh that is more disturbing than ever in today’s circumstances.