The new mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, a former fascist, has launched a campaign to promote Italian films at the expense of those featuring Hollywood stars such as Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio, who are to be blacklisted.
American actors who flocked to Rome for its film festival will no longer be invited, on the orders of Alemanno, 50, of the National Alliance party, who last week became the first rightwinger to win the mayor’s job in 15 years.
Outside city hall, his followers greeted him with fascist salutes and shouts of “Duce! Duce!” – the title used by the dictator Benito Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943.
Alemanno, a former minister of agriculture, has a colourful past. He was arrested in 1981 with four other neo-fascists for allegedly beating up a student with baseball bats, but no charges were pressed.
The following year he was incarcerated for eight months, accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the Soviet embassy, but was eventually acquitted. He was also arrested in 1989, this time for trying to block the motorcade of President George H W Bush, and was again found not guilty.
Alemanno made an overhaul of the star-studded Rome film festival one of his manifesto promises.
“I believe we need to promote Italian films rather than Hollywood stars,” he declared last week. One of his campaign slogans was: “Alemanno – for less cinema and more security.” He has appointed Pasquale Squitieri, 69, a veteran director of spaghetti westerns, who lives with screen legend Claudia Cardinale, 70, to “give us a hand to promote our cinema”.
Squitieri made the film Claretta about Mussolini’s mistress Clara Petacci, who was shot with the dictator in 1945 and hanged upside down alongside him.
Last week he said there was precious little for Italy’s film industry to celebrate.
Italian films have not won an Oscar for best foreign film since Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust comedy-drama Life Is Beautiful in 1999.
“Italian cinema used to be in great shape, now it doesn’t exist any more. So what are we celebrating? Nicole Kidman and Leonardo DiCaprio?” he asked.
George Clooney is also unlikely to be welcomed back to Rome; he warmly praised Alemanno’s centre-left-wing predecessor, the failed presidential candidate Walter Veltroni.
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