Rome's Alice in the City becomes autonomous, part of bigger initiative

Alice in the City, the children’s film programme that was formerly part of the Rome Film Festival, will now run as an autonomous and parallel section to the festival.

The 10-day event in Novmeber is seen as the first step in the first step in the more comprehensive long-term project Imaginare which will kick off in September 2013 and will be direclty involved in schools and the Internet to promote cinema to young people.

This year’s Alice nella citta competition presentes 12 films, including four world premieres: Estaban Larrain’s The Passion of Michelangelo (Chile); Chen-Hsi Wong’s Innocents (Singapore), Justine Mallet’s Youth (France), and Guiseppe Bonito’s Pulce Non C’E (Italy).

Out of competition presentations will include Rich Moore’s Wreck-It Ralph and Carine Tardieu’s The Dandelions. New saga Beautiful Creatures will also be launched in Rome.

Another world premiere will be Michel Ocelot’s final Kirikou trilogy film, Kirikou And The Men and Women.

Jointly with the main Rome Film Festival, Alice will host the international premiere of Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2.

The organisers Gianluca Giannelli and Fabia Bettini said they will push themselves to “the most extreme possibilities and work on the scale of what is permitted…sharing will be the paradigm for our mode of operation.” The series plans to work with online and physical worlds simultaneously.

Alice In The City’s supporters include the MiBAC - Direzione Generale per il Cinema and under the tutelage and with the collaboration of the Dipartimento della Gioventù and the Servizio Civile Nazionale, the Provincia di Roma and the Rome Chamber of Commerce.