L’Empire by Bruno Dumont

Each year Bellaria Film Festival opens with an evening in the name of great cinema on an international level, featuring the most significant film of the edition. Opening the 42nd Bellaria Film Festival is L’Empire by Bruno Dumont, winner of the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.

National premiere in the presence of the director!

Overview

Behind the appearance of the mundane daily life of a fishing village on the Opal Coast, the epic parallel lives of the knights of the interplanetary kingdoms emerge. Rival clans are engaged in a fierce and bloody battle following the announcement of the birth of Margat, the resurrected Prince, purple and lurid, the Beast of the End of Times, who is here on the Coast, the son of a young couple already separated, as is usual in a working-class neighbourhood….

Bruno Dumont will take a masterclass on his cinema. The masterclass is open to all and will be delivered in French, with simultaneous translation in Italian.

Born in 1958 in Bailleul in Flanders, he is one of the most austere and provocative filmmakers on the French film scene. A forerunner of “new mystical cinema,” capable of smashing all critical judgments with his gaze on the world, privileging the relationship between bodies and spaces, in his films he has recounted the banality of evil and the mystery of reality through everyday life, love as hope and as joy, violence and isolation, sex and death, guilt and mysticism. Themes then reversed with comic verve in the more recent outcomes of his artistic journey, in search of a form of sincere tenderness, of that “soft light” latent in every human being in the void of contemporaneity.