Michele Placido’s film Eternal Visionary, about Italian Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello, will soon be released worldwide by Pulsar Content, the VARIETY website announces. Pirandello is played by Fabrizio Bentivoglio, one of the most popular Italian actors. We have seen him play in Loro, The Invisible Boy and Human Capital. Bentivoglio stars alongside filmmaker and actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (Les Amours d’Anaïs, Les Amandiers…), who plays Pirandello’s wife. Federica Vicenti, the director’s wife, plays the playwright’s muse.
The film opens in 1934, two years before Pirandello’s death, when he travels to Stockholm, where he is about to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He then immerses himself in his memories and recalls the drama and magic of the loved ones who populated his life and inspired his art. He remembers the madness of his wife, his stormy relationship with his children, his controversial stance towards fascism and his love for Marta Abba, the young actress who became his companion and source of inspiration .
Currently in post-production, the film has a budget of 12.5 million euros, an ambitious budget for an Italian film, specifies Variety. Eternal Visionary is produced by Goldenart Production and Rai Cinema. It will be previewed to buyers at the European Film Market in Berlin. No trailer or release date has been communicated yet.
Novelist, poet, playwright, Luigi Pirandello is a prolific author who became known in particular thanks to his plays. Its influence extended well beyond the Italian borders. “Pirandellism” has become a conception of the world which induces a relativity of language and reason, the impossibility of knowing others and communicating with them, avatars of the personality and a credit given to madness. His best-known work, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), is famous for its audacity; Pirandello breaks the fourth wall and asks: are fictional characters less real than the actors who play them? In Paris, where he met with great success, he inspired thinkers and playwrights such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Ionesco and Jean Genet.
