Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree: Dominique Sanda

Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree: Dominique Sanda

Her presence was so great that they had to come up with an honorific, unmistakable name for her, as they did “The King” for Elvis. So they dubbed her “La Sanda,” an even more distinctive and personal name for an actress whose presence marked every role she ever took. Has any actor or actress ever started their careers by working, virtually without interruption, with filmic directorial legend after legend, French, Italian, and American? These legends included Robert Bresson, Vittorio De Sica, Bernardo Bertolucci, and John Huston. Add in the directors she has worked with since that amazing start in the early ’70s: Luchino Visconti, Liliana Cavani, John Frankenheimer, René Allio, Philippe Garrel, Louis Malle, Jacques Demy, Michel Deville, Marguerite Duras, Lina Wertmuller, Benoit Jacquot, Edgardo Cozarinski, Maria Luisa Bemberg, Matthieu Kassovitz, Nicole Garcia, Bertrand Bonello. This nonpareil filmography establishes a new definition for the phrase “in demand.”

But it is Dominique Sanda’s tremendous performances themselves that speak to her profound greatness in film after film, regardless of director, country, culture, or vision. She is simply unforgettable, no matter what role she plays, no matter who she incarnates, bestowing her intelligence, elegance, beauty, wit, and humanity on every character. In this sense, she is not just the apotheosis of filmic acting, but perhaps even of humanity itself.

It is both a great honor and a pleasure to welcome Dominique to Maine this year to receive her first Lifetime Achievement Award.

World Restoration Premiere! 1900 (Novecento)

Italy 1976 – DCP – 317 minutes

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Producer: Alberto Grimaldi

Screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci

Principal Cast: Robert de Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Stefania Sandrelli, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster

Print Courtesy: Paramount Pictures

After his remarkable triumphs with The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci, at the height of his powers (though still before his amazing Oscar win for The Last Emperor), had something more ambitious in mind. 1900 (Novecento) is nothing less than a history of the 20th century told in political and personal terms over the course of decades in the lives of two Italian childhood friends, one owning class, one working class. The childhood friends turn into Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu; their partners include Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli; the others in this mad and magnificent cast include Burt Lancaster and Donald Sutherland, and 1900 is, yes, a bit over five hours long. This is the world premiere of a DCP restoration of Bertolucci’s preferred cut, restored especially for MIFF, an event simply not to be missed. Beyond the film’s unparalleled ambition and committed politics, it’s a movie’s movie, grand and sweeping and full of all the things we go to the movies for. Only more of them.

Sponsored by Ken Eisen

The Conformist

Italy/France 1970 – DCP – 113 minutes

In Italian and French with English subtitles

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Producer: Maurizio Lodi-Fé

Screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, based on the novel by Alberto Moravia

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio

Print Courtesy: Kino Lorber Films

“It’s a triumph of feeling and style—lyrical, flowing, velvety style, so operatic that you come away with sequences in your head like arias.”—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker. From Bernardo Bertolucci, a film by a director who went on to notoriety (Last Tango in Paris), Oscar recognition (The Last Emperor) and more great masterpieces (Besieged, The Dreamers, Stealing Beauty, Me and You). But The Conformist remains unmatched. “This is one of the greatest movies ever made, arguably THE greatest, more full of life, love, poetry, and passion than a year’s worth of other movies”—Ken Eisen, MIFF Programming Director. In Mussolini’s Italy, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s repressed haut bourgeois Marcello Clerici, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode (and murder), joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor, whose Paris address, in a pointed homage, matched Jean-Luc Godard’s real one), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium; and wife Stefania Sandrelli dancing the tango in a working-class hall with lover Dominique Sanda. Bertolucci’s masterpiece of a political thriller, adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic look created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by the great Georges Delerue (Jules and Jim), and eye-popping color cinematography by Vittorio Storaro.

Wednesday, July 18, 12:00 p.m., RR1

Thursday, July 19, 3:30 p.m., RR1

Presentation of Lifetime Achievement Award & The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Italy 1971 – DCP – 94 minutes

In Italian with English subtitles

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Screenplay: Vittorio Bonicelli, Ugo Pirro, based on the novel by Giorgio Bassani

Cast: Dominique Sanda, Fabio Testi, Romolo Valli, Helmut Berger, Lino Capolicchio

Print Courtesy: Arthur Cohn

Not only did The Garden of the Finzi-Continis win an Oscar in 1971 for Best Foreign Language Film, but it also became a worldwide box office smash, playing in dubbed English as well as subtitled versions in towns like Waterville (yes, back in the day when there was no Railroad Square Cinema or anything remotely like it). Vittorio De Sica, best known for The Bicycle Thief and other defining classics of Italian neo-realism, masterfully orchestrates the story of the wealthy Finzi-Continis, who seem to have everything in pre-World War II Italy. Theirs is a world of tennis games and lawn parties, of lush summer days at their expansive mansion, of love affairs embarked on and contemplated. But the Finzi-Continis happen to be Jewish, and, almost unnoticed, the forces that are about to literally blow Europe apart are beginning to close in on their idyllic fortress.

Sponsored by Jill Gordon

Going Away (Un beau dimanche)

France 2014 – DCP – 95 minutes In French with English subtitles

Director: Nicole Garcia

Producer: Philippe Martin

Screenplay: Nicole Garcia, Jacques Fieschi, Cast: Pierre Rochefort, Louise Bourgoin, Dominique Sanda, Déborah François, Mathias Brezot Print Courtesy: Cohen Brothers Film Collection

“(In) Nicole Garcia’s lovely surprise of a romantic drama...pretty much everybody but Baptiste (Pierre Rochefort), a soulful young teacher, is going away for a long holiday weekend. When he gives a student a ride home, it turns out that the student’s father forgot he was on dad duty. He’s going away too, taking his selfish girlfriend to Monaco. Baptiste volunteers to baby-sit, and the student talks him into a trip to the beach, where they find his intense mother, Sandra (Louise Bourgoin), a beachfront restaurant waitress who needs to go away because she owes big money to some tough guys who aren’t above physical violence. Baptiste decides to help, which requires a drive to Languedoc, where over an idyllic holiday lunch alfresco, Sandra learns about the time Baptiste had to—yes—go away, and how his family treated him. It’s a quietly compelling story. And twothirds of the way through, there’s an elating good-news revelation worthy of a 1930s screwball comedy. Dominique Sanda, more elegant than ever, turns up as Baptiste’s mother, an intriguing blend of warmth and coldness, in a Garden of the Finzi-Continis setting”— Anita Gates, New York Times

Sponsored by Julia Sidelinger

The Inheritance

Italy 1976 – Digital Projection – 105 minutes

In English

Director: Mauro Bolognini

Producer: Gianni Hecht Lucari

Screenplay: Sergio Bazzini, Roberto Bigazzi, Ugo Pirro, based on the novel by Gaetano Carlo Chelli

Cast: Dominique Sanda, Anthony Quinn, Fabio Testi, Gigi Proietti, Adriana Asti

Print Courtesy: Intramovies

Sanda won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress prize for The Inheritance, Mauro Bolognini’s sumptuous 19th century-set drama. Sanda plays Irene, a calculating yet nonetheless sympathetic schemer who marries the son of a wealthy aging man (played in characteristically larger than life fashion by Zorba the Greek’s Anthony Quinn) estranged from his sons, then seduces his brother, all with an eye toward moving in on the man with the money.

Sponsored by Hathaway Mill Antiques

Sunday, July 15, 6:30 p.m., OH

Friday, July 20, 3:30 p.m., OH

Saturday, July 21, 3:30 p.m., RR1