Competition: “Il Divo” by Paolo Sorrentino

Il Divo is the second Italian film in the running for a Palme d’Or, following upon Gomorra, and the third by director Paolo Sorrentino to be premiered at the Festival de Cannes, after Consequences of Love in 2004 and The Family Friend in 2006. Il Divo is a feature-length portrait of Giulio Andreotti, an emblematic figure in the past four decades of Italian politics. In the early 1990s, this sly, shrewd, and impenetrable Christian Democrat was heading for his seventh term as Prime Minister, his only claim to satisfaction being his ability to maintain his grip on power. Power is what he enjoys, fixed and immutable. Unshaken by either terrorist attacks or scandalous accusations, he kept to his course… Until the day the Mafia declared war on him. That’s when things might have changed… unless it was just another ruse.

“I’ve always wanted to make a film about Andreotti, but when I started reading up on him, I found myself wading through literature that was so vast and contradictory, it made my head spin. For a long time, I thought that all this “material” could never be funnelled into the essential structure that a film, with it’s rules, requires. Moreover, the image of Andreotti as the quintessence of ambiguity has not only been projected by scholars, reporters and Italians in general, but is also one that he himself has cultivated by invariably playing on and exploiting that ambiguity.”