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Italy’s Fandango Film Sales has taken world rights outside Italy on Andrea Segre’s “The Great Ambition,” a biopic of late Italian political leader Enrico Berlinguer, who during the 1970s was secretary of Western Europe’s largest Communist Party.
The film, which is lead-produced by Rome-based indie Vivo film (“Nico, 1988,” “Le Quattro Volte”) has been set as the Rome Film Festival opener, as previously announced.
Elio Germano, who won the actor top honors in Cannes with Daniele Luchetti’s “Our Life,” plays Berlinguer, who led the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1972 until his death in 1984. Berlinguer nearly brought the PCI to power in the Italian parliamentary elections of 1976.
Germano is currently at Venice Film Festival with the Mafia drama “Sicilian Letters.” Segre was last at Venice with the 2021 drama “Welcome Venice,” which played in Venice Days.
“When a way forward seems impossible to everyone, do you have to stop? Enrico Berlinguer did not,” says the provided synopsis. “He was the Secretary in the 1970s of the most important Communist party in the western world, with over 1,700,000 card-holding members and more than 12 million voters, united by the great ambition of achieving socialism within a democracy.”
The description continues, “Challenging the dogmas of the Cold War and a world divided in two, Berlinguer and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) sought for five years to come to power, opening a season of dialogue with the Christian Democrats and coming just an inch from changing history.”
Segre, in his directors’ statement, calls the film “a journey through a piece of our history that I did not live through and which I learned to understand,” adding that for him it also marked “the discovery of a profound dialogue with the open questions of our present time and our future which this memory is unexpectedly able to engage in.”
Lucky Red will release “The Great Ambition” in Italy on Oct. 31.
English (US) ·