Immaginare prima" meeting with Dante Ferretti

Italian set and costume designer, three-time Oscar winner and the most awarded in the history of the Nastri d’argento, he was born in Macerata in 1943, a city he left after his studies to go to Rome and pursue his dream of cinema.

He made his debut in the 1960s on the sets of Pier Paolo Pasolini, quickly becoming his regular set designer. During the same period, he worked with some of Italy’s leading directors, fromElio Petri to Marco Bellocchio and Luigi Comencini, and also established himself as a set designer and stage director for plays and operas.

His impressive sets proved particularly well-suited to the dreamlike atmospheres of Federico Fellini, with whom he forged a happy collaboration and intense friendship, interrupted only by the Rimini director’s death. The visionary sets of films such as The Name of the Rose and The Adventures of Baron Münchausen established him internationally, and led to numerous collaborations with Martin Scorsese and directors such as Neil Jordan(Interview with a Vampire), Anthony Minghella(Return to Cold Mountain), then Brian De Palma, Tim Burton, Kenneth Branagh and many others… All these names confirm his visionary talent and incessant creativity, but also what he himself would define as a great “kick in the anthill”.

Gian Luca Farinelli has been director of the Cineteca di Bologna since 2000. In 1986, he founded Il Cinema Ritrovato with Nicola Mazzanti, Il Cinema Ritrovato, an event dedicated to the history of cinema and the activities of film libraries, considered the most important of its kind worldwide.

With the Cineteca, he designed and organized events and festivals, including Sotto le stelle del cinema. He led the creation of Italy’s first film restoration school, L’Immagine Ritrovatafunded by the European Union, which led to the creation of the restoration laboratory of the same name, in operation since 1992, which today lends its work to the world’s leading film archives and has recently opened two branches in Hong Kong and Paris. He is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in film restoration and the promotion of film heritage.

In 1997, the French government awarded him the title of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, in 2008 the Ordre national du Mérite, and in 2022 he became an Officier des Arts et des Lettres. He founded the World Cinema Foundation with Martin Scorsese, and since 2022 has been a member of the Supervisory Board of Pathé. In March 2022, he was appointed Chairman of the Fondazione Cinema per Roma.

The fruit of lengthy conversations with writer David Miliozzi, Immaginare prima is a journey from the Italian provinces of the 1940s to the Hollywood of today, a behind-the-scenes look at the films that have shaped the history of cinema. In “Primo Tempo”, the first half of a life that resembles a film, Ferretti reveals how his land and his birth influenced his most famous sets, he launches into memories of “his” directors – Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese – and the companions and stars he met behind and in front of the camera.

In “Secondo Tempo” and “Titoli di Coda”, the voice passes to David Miliozzi who retraces his professional and human path, in pursuit of the Maestro, looking for memories, anecdotes, images.
The fruit of this research is the portrait of a humble, tenacious and ingenious man who succeeded in becoming the symbol of “Made In Italy”.