It’s fitting that Roberto Rossellini’s Year One (1974) returns to this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), five decades on from the night of June 27, 1977, when it opened the annual event’s very first edition.
The brief back then was that HKIFF would serve to connect the city’s rising band of film-goers with what was going on in the wider cinematic world, and Rossellini had form, having been at the forefront of Italian cinema’s neorealism movement. He had won acclaim for rich, immersive dramas such as the Cannes Palme d’Or-winning Rome, Open City (1945) and the Ingrid Bergman vehicle Stromboli (1950).
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So Hong Kong audiences got a feel for Rossellini’s style and vision in Year One — the director’s take on post-war Italy and the career of politician Alcide De Gasperi (Luigi Vannucchi) who helped get the country back on its feet. They were also exposed to a unique voice in Italian cinema and the movie matched that original HKIFF brief.
Five decades on, Rossellini’s Year One is back with a special 4K restoration version and is part of an exciting selection of Italian movies spread across the festival’s varied sections.
“We have a particularly strong lineup of Italian films this year, especially those by well-known directors like Paolo Sorrentino, Luca Guadagnino and Pietro Marcello,” says HKIFF director of programming, Geoffrey Wong. “What especially excites me this year is the presence of different genres of Italian films, including animation, documentaries, and restored classics like Year One. I’m delighted that all these directors are delivering great works this year, as if celebrating our 50th anniversary with us.”
Italian cinema’s love of high drama gets an airing in Guadagnino’s After the Hunt (2025) — with Julia Roberts shredding any semblance to her nice-lady persona in her role as a college professor who gets entangled in an alleged sexual abuse case.
Marcello — who has so far dabbled in docu-drama (multi-award-winner The Mouth of the Wolf, 2009) and historical romance (Martin Eden, 2019) across his career — is represented by a film that does a little of both. His HKIFF offering is the Venice Golden Lion-nominated Duse (2025), based on the life and times of the famed Italian actress Eleonora Duse (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) in post-war Italy.
The promise of Sorrentino joining forces once again with the great Toni Servillo — a working relationship immortalized in their Oscar-winner The Great Beauty (2013) — is manifest in La Grazia (2025). In it, Servillo plays a president torn by moral conflict — a part for which he picked up the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival last year.
And then there’s intrigue when it comes to the Giovanni Columbu-directed Balentes (2024) — described by The Film Verdict as a “meticulously hand-crafted piece of artisan cinema”. Through its unique monochrome visuals, the animation film narrates a tragic tale of three boys on a rescue mission that leads to their demise in the Sardinia of 1940.
