August 7 at Locarno 2020 will be the night of the Maestro, with great cinema and marvelous music. The Locarno Film Festival could not refrain from remembering Ennio Morricone, the film music giant and first person in the Festival's history to receive the Pardo d'onore, who passed away last month. Locarno 2020 will dedicate the night of August 7 to him and his long career. At 8.30 PM at the PalaVideo, audiences will get to see the extended version of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), a cinematic masterpiece with an equally masterful score.
It was in 1984 that theaters all over the world welcomed one of the milestones of film history, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. It's an extraordinary film, with a great cast and an unforgettable score. Ennio Morricone wrote a veritable symphony, with moments of sublime original music in dialogue with the works of the Beatles, Gioacchino Rossini and George Gershwin. The Locarno audience will get to hear this music as part of a beautiful restored print running 25q minutes, on August 7 at 8.30 PM at the PalaVideo, with a repeat screening on August 11 at 9 AM at PalaCinema1.
In 1989, five years after the release of Once Upon a Time in America, the Locarno Film Festival gave its first ever Pardo d'onore to Ennio Morricone. It was an unforgettable night in Piazza Grande, with career remembrances and live music. And then, 14 years later, the man who scored the films of dozens of great directors - including Luciano Salce, Oliver Stone, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Quentin Tarantino - came back to Locarno to meet the audience at the Forum, where he talked about cinema and music, reigniting the magic that happens between words and a piano.
The Locarno 2020 audience will get to relive that encounter from 17 years ago with the project Discutiamo, discutiamo, a selection of 20 masterclasses from the past, from 1985 to 2019, ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to John Waters, and including part of this edition's tribute to the Maestro.
