"Fondazione Prada - Milan | “Flesh, Mind and Spirit”

A FILM FESTIVAL CURATED BY ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU, AND STRENGTHENS ITS COMMITMENT TO CINEMA.

Fondazione Prada in Milan presents “Flesh, Mind and Spirit”, a selection of 15 films chosen by Academy Award-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu, recently awarded three Golden Globes for The Revenant, in collaboration with Elvis Mitchell, film critic and Curator at LACMA of Los Angeles. The screenings are free, upon booking, and will be held at Fondazione Prada’s Cinema every day, except Tuesdays, until February 1st, 2016

Elvis Mitchell, co-curator of the festival, will introduce the scheduled screenings from until Monday 18 January. On Saturday 16 January, Marco Bellocchio will attend the screening of I pugni in tasca (Fists in the pocket, 1965) at 9pm, followed by a Q&A between the film director and the public. 

Presented for the first time in 2009 at the Prada Transformer, designed by OMA in Seoul, the film festival extends the research Fondazione Prada has sustained in the realm of cinema for more than a decade. Between 2003 and 2006 important collaborations with international institutions such as the Tribeca Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival were developed. In 2004 the groundbreaking program of the Tribeca Film Festival travelled outside the USA for the first time and audiences in Milan were offered the opportunity to attend the screenings of selected films from the festival, along with talks and Q&As with directors and actors. In the following years, a vast film restoration project was initiated in collaboration with the Venice Biennale, with the aim to rediscover forgotten or overlooked cinematographic heritage. 

From 2004 to 2005, during three editions of the Venice Film Festival, the retrospectives “Italian Kings of the Bs: The Secret History of Italian Cinema”, “The Secret History of Asian Cinema” and “The Secret History of Russian Cinema”, all curated by Marco Müller, were presented in Venice and subsequently travelled to Milan, London, New York, Melbourne and Tokyo. In addition to this, in the past years Fondazione Prada has realized special commissions by artists such as Steve McQueen and Tobias Rehberger, who have employed cinematographic imagery and languages to conceive exhibitions and site-specific projects. 

With the opening of its new Milan venue last May, Fondazione Prada has strengthened its commitment to this artistic discipline. The Cinema building was inaugurated with “Roman Polanski: My Inspirations”, a documentary-interview in which the film director retraced his creative path, accompanied by a selection of his own films as well as masterpieces from the past. Director Wes Anderson, on the other hand, conceived Bar Luce at the new site, where he recreated the atmosphere of a typical Milanese cafè, reminiscent of Italian popular culture and aesthetics from the 1950s and 1960s and of the cinematographic iconography of masterpieces such as Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951) by Vittorio De Sica and Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) by Luchino Visconti. 

Fondazione Prada will continue to investigate new practices through which a visual arts institution can relate to cinema, in addition to the organization of film festivals. Further research in this direction will be presented in “Belligerent Eyes”, a film school in which new educational perspectives in filmmaking and film studies will be promoted and stimulated. The project, to be hosted at Fondazione Prada Venetian venue Ca’ Corner della Regina from May to September 2016, will engage an international network of academics, professionals and a selected group of students from disciplines as different as filmmaking, architecture, journalism and digital cultures. 

Its aim is to challenge the traditional norms related to education in the field of cinema, reflecting on the socio-cultural transformations undergone by contemporary image production, and to set the ground for innovative researches in the fields of cinema studies, filmmaking and film distribution. 

“Flesh, Mind and Spirit” offers a unique occasion to experience the reactions and emotions that the director felt when he first saw these films. As Iñárritu explains, “despite this extremely eclectic selection, there is a common factor: these films are all experiences full of emotion. All of them provoked in me appetites that I never knew I had”.

The full-length films are divided into three categories distinguished by a key word: “Flesh”groups Lonesome (1928), Fists in the Pocket (1965), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Seasons of the Year (1975), Killer of Sheep (1977), Padre Padrone (1977), Yol (1982), and The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008); “Mind” comprises Last Year at Marienbad (1961), I am Cuba (1964), La Ciénaga (2001), and You, the Living (2007); and “Spirit” consists of Ordet (1955), Mother and Son (1997) and Silent Light (2007). As emphasized by Elvis Mitchell, “most of them are about the family in crisis, and the survival of the family is key to the way Iñárritu works, thinks and feels as an artist and a person”.

Source:
Fondazione Prada