Travelling
In 2013, just after his election, Pope Francis went to Lampedusa. In 2021 he made an important journey to the Middle East, going to Iraq and Kurdistan. The same places that Gianfranco Rosi had depicted in Fuocoammare and Notturno. In the nine years of his pontificate Francis has made thirty-seven journeys, visiting fifty-three countries. Whether in Italy, Brazil, Cuba, the United States, the African continent or Southeast Asia, his itineraries have followed the guiding thread of the central themes of our time: poverty, nature, migration, condemnation of all war, solidarity. In a sort of Via Crucis, Francis has born witness to the suffering of the world and found out how difficult it is to do more than offer the comfort of his words and his presence Gianfranco Rosi has retraced the pope’s journeys, watching the films that have documented them.
Gianfranco Rosi
Director
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Gianfranco Rosi
During a five year period an Italian filmmaker documents the world of down-on-their-luck individuals who live in a Californian desert trying to get by one day at a time. None of them has more than a vehicle, a dog and some clothes.
After the India of Varanasi’s boatmen, the American desert of the dropouts, and the Mexico of the killers of drugtrade, Gianfranco Rosi has decided to tell the tale of a part of his own country, roaming and filming for over two years in a minivan on Rome’s giant ring road—the Grande Raccordo Anulare, or GRA—to discover the invisible worlds and possible futures harbored in this area of constant turmoil. Elusive characters and fleeting apparitions emerge from the background of the winding zone: a nobleman from the Piemonte region and his college student daughter sharing a one-room efficiency in a modern apartment building along the GRA.
Capturing life on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a frontline in the European migrant crisis.
Boatman is Gianfranco Rosi's account of a boattrip along the Ganges river, together with his helmsman Gopal. They pass tourists and Indians who are bathing, working or meditating. In a series of small portraits Rosi depicts life on and at the banks of India's sacred river. Central theme of this film is the imagination of the endless circle of life and death, which is rooted in the lives of the Indian people, and which is convincingly manifested in the way they bid the dead farewell.
Renato Nicolini is travelling along the Grande Raccordo Anulare. The traffic flows behind him like thoughts that have been triggered in a logic of free association. His story consists of memories and connections that span esoteric suggestions, city-planning considerations, and metropolitan legends.
A portrait of those trying to survive in the war-torn Middle East.
The story of a hitman for the drug cartels in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
