It was his wish to learn the art of the great Italian masters that first led him to move to Italy, where he studied at the Brera Fine Arts Academy of Milan. Getting back to Carlo Levi, who before emerging as a writer already had a career as a painter, Michael Moore’s first love was art, and in particular, sculpture. Moore also holds the important post of interpreter and translator for the Italian Mission to the UN, and has chaired the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, dedicated to supporting the art of translation in American through grants to deserving young translators. For Rialto Pictures he also did The Boom, by Vittorio De Sica, and Senso, by Luchino Visconti, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of a long and varied career as a translator, interpreter, writer and Italophile that has led the American intellectual to tackle some of the greatest names of Italian literature, from classics like Manzoni, Moravia, and Primo Levi, to contemporaries like Edgardo Franzosini, Fabio Genovesi, Erri De Luca, and Nicola Gardini, to name just a few. This is not the first time Michael has tried his hand on subtitles.

The first screening will be introduced by its American translator. The film is distributed by Rialto Pictures and is being shown at the Film Forum of New York, running from April 3 to 18. This forced exile became an opportunity for the writer to be a witness to, chronicler and narrator of the southern question, painting in vivid tones the rural lyricism and magic realism of the landscape, on the one hand, and the deep socio-cultural backwardness of the peasants, crushed by the hegemony of the petty bourgeoisie of the small towns and the autarky of the ruling fascist regime. A writer and painter from Piedmont, from 1935 to 1936 he was sentenced to internal exile, in Basilicata, by the Fascist regime for his anti-Fascist activities. The occasion of our meeting is the presentation of the uncut version, never before released in America, of Francesco Rosi’s film, Christ Stopped at Eboli, based on the book of the same title, for which Moore did the subtitles.

The betrothed 2022 by michael f moore