Think of the great filmmaker and actor partnerships: Kurosawa and Mifune; Truffaut and Leaud; Scorsese and De Niro… In Italy, we think of Fellini and Mastroiannni, and now, surely, Paolo Sorrentino and Toni Servillo. Of Sorrentino’s 10 features, Servillo has starred in seven, most famously the Academy Award–winning The Great Beauty.
In their latest collaboration, Servillo plays a fictional President of the Republic, Mariano De Santis — a Catholic widower and legal scholar approaching the end of his term and deliberating whether to issue two presidential pardons that touch on his private life in complicated ways. This is a serious ethical drama about power and moral dilemmas, the kind of thorny questions of conscience that seem to have gone out of fashion in today’s politics. Servillo and Sorrentino insist that integrity is not always a black and white issue, but a responsibility to reckon with.
Volpi Cup for Best Actor (Toni Servillo), Venice 2025
Supported by
Toni Servillo, Anna Ferzetti
Italy
2025
In Italian with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Credits & Director
Producer
Andrea Scrosati, Annamaria Morelli, Paolo Sorrentino
Screenwriter
Paolo Sorrentino
Cinematography
Daria D’Antonio
Editor
Cristiano Travaglioli
Production Design
Ludovica Ferrario
Paolo Sorrentino
Filmography: The Great Beauty (2013); Rio, I love You (2014); Youth (2015); Loro (2018); The Hand of God (2021); Parthenope (2024)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Amrum
Twelve-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck) sets himself a mission to secure bread and honey for his mother to snap her out of her depression. It is 1945. The war is all but lost, and such luxuries are not easy to find on the remote island of Amrum...
Holy Days
After his mom passes, Brian (Elijah Tamati) is comforted by Sisters Agnes, Luke and Mary Clare (Judy Davis, Miriam Margolyes and Jacki Weaver, respectively). The quirky quartet hit the road to save their convent from being sold to a property developer.
Blue Heron
In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocate to a new home on Vancouver Island. Their fresh start is interrupted by increasingly dangerous behaviour from Jeremy, the family’s oldest child.