Film Forum

Italy/France, 1959
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Approx. 90 min.  

Fed up with narrative filmmaking and invited by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to make a film in India, Rossellini embarked upon an adventure in documentary filmmaking. At the conclusion of his odyssey, Rossellini would have a ten-episode television series, a feature film, an Indian government renouncing any and all support, and another intercontinental romantic scandal. (He would eventually marry his scenarist Sonali Senroy Das Gupta, with whom he would have two children.) INDIA: MATRI BHUMI is an encyclopedic effort to catalog the varied geographic, ethnic, religious, natural, and architectural dimensions of life in India, a majestic kaleidoscope that never stops turning. Upon its debut at Cannes in 1959, Jean-Luc Godard would proclaim that to watch INDIA: MATRI BHUMI was to witness “the creation of the world.”

Courtesy Janus Films.

With

Interview with Salvador Allende: Power and Reason (Intervista a Salvador Allende: La forza e la ragione)
Italy/Chile, 1973
Directed by Roberto Rossellini and Emidio Greco
Approx. 43 min.

Rossellini spent significant time in Chile in the early 1970s, chasing various projects that never got off the ground. He did manage, however, to befriend Salvador Allende, and conduct an interview with him in May 1971. Italian television station RAI acquired the interview, but did not air it until 1973, after Pinochet’s coup and Allende’s death sparked renewed interest in the conversation.

Courtesy Janus Films.

Reviews

On INDIA: MATRI BHUMI:
“A sublime symbiosis of fable and non-fiction that poetically interrelates humans and animals, city and village, society and nature.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum  

“A sensuous symphony of earth and flesh, yet all the more spiritual thereby... Elephants, tigers, monkeys, oxen, snakes, and flies abound, but INDIA on its most profound level is concerned with life only as one form of movement.”
– Michael McKegney, Village Voice