Festa del Cinema di Roma celebrates 19 years in Rome.

The 2024 Rome Film Festival offers cinema fans 12 days of movie premieres, screenings, masterclasses and special guests in the Italian capital from 16-27 October.

The Festa del Cinema di Roma, whose artistic director is Paola Malanga, is based at the Auditorium Parco della Musica - Ennio Morricone, with events also taking place in other cultural venues around the capital including MAXXI and Casa del Cinema.

The 19th edition of the festival is dedicated to the late, legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni to mark the centenary of his birth.

The festival will honour Hollywood actor Johnny Depp with a lifetime achievement award and will screen his biopic of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, with Riccardo Scamarcio in the title role alongside Al Pacino.

Titled Modì - Three Days on the Wings of Madness, the film is described as a “72-hour whirlwind" in the life of the bohemian artist, through a chaotic series of events in Paris in 1916, four years before Modigliani's death aged 35.

There will be a career award too for American actor Viggo Mortensen who will present his film The Dead Don’t Hurt, a Western which he wrote, directed and stars in.

Veteran US director Francis Ford Coppola will also be in the Eternal City for a special ‘pre-opening’ Italian premiere of Megalopolis at Cinecittà Studios, on 14 October, and is set to receive an award from the Mayor of Rome.

The 2024 festival opens with Andrea Segre's Berlinguer. La Grande Ambizione, a world premiere and one of the 18 films in the competition section.

The movie stars Elio Germano as Enrico Berlinguer who led the Italian Communist Party from 1972 until his death in 1984. 

The other 17 movies in competition, many of them world premieres, are:

• 100 Litres of Gold by Teemu Nikki (Italy, Finland)
• L’Albero by Sara Petraglia (Italy)
• L’Art D’Être Heureux by Stefan Liberski (Belgium, France)
• Bring Them Down by Christopher Andrews (Ireland, UK, Belgium)
• Le Choix by Gilles Bourdos (France)
• Es Geht Um Luis (About Luis) by Lucia Chiarla (Germany)
• Greedy People by Potsy Ponciroli (US)
• L’Isola degli Idealisti by Elisabetta Sgarbi (Italy)
• Jazzy by Morissa Maltz (US) 
• Kun Bang Shang Tian Tang (Bound in Heaven) by Huo Xin
• Reading Lolita in Tehran (Leggere Lolita a Teheran) by Eran Riklis (Italy, Israel)
• La Nuit se Traine by Michiel Blanchart (Belgium, France)
• Polvo Serán by Carlos Marques-Marcet (Spain, Italy, Switzerland)
• Querido Trópico by Ana Endara (Panama, Colombia)
• Spirit World by Eric Khoo (France, Japan, Singapore)
• Paradiso in Vendita by Luca Barbareschi (Italy, France)
• The Trainer by Tony Kaye (US)

For full details including programme and tickets see the Rome Film Festival website.