The Great Beauty Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino told the press at the Venice Film Festival that his latest film La Grazia which opens the 82nd edition of the world's oldest film fest Wednesday night was about "love, doubt and politics".
    "A film about love.

Not just immediate love, which concerns history, but also love in the broader sense for a wife, a daughter, and also for institutions, for the law, and even love for a way of engaging in politics that is unfortunately increasingly out of date, one that was tied to the exercise of doubt and responsibility," the Il Divo, Youth, Hand of God, Loro and Pathenope helmer said about La grazia, which received much applause at Wednesday morning's press screening.
    In the film, to be released in theaters on January 15, 2026, by PiperFilm, Mariano De Santis (his totemic actor Toni Servillo) is the fictional President of the Republic, a widower and Catholic who lives in the Quirinale Palace with his daughter, Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti), a jurist like himself.
    He is now at the end of his term and must decide on two delicate requests for pardon, both related to euthanasia.
    However, deep within him remains the great love for his wife, who passed away eight years earlier, coupled with a further doubt that haunts him.
    And again on doubt, the Oscar-winning director says: "The exercise of doubt is one of the qualities rarely seen in politics.
    "The degeneration of doubt in the First Republic was called immobility.
    "But on issues like granting a pardon to a murderer or signing a law on euthanasia, the exercise of doubt should be a conditio sine qua non.
    "Today," Sorrentino said, "we too often witness men of power exercising certainties.

Only once those certainties were supported by ideologies. Today they are mostly bizarre."
   

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA