Director Dell’Olio: “Docufilm on Zeffirelli, fascinated by his figure as a man and artist”

“We knew each other, we liked each other, but above all I have always been fascinated by his figure as a man and artist”. This is what the director Anselma Dell’Olio who directs the docufilm ‘Zeffirelli, the rebel conformist’ underlines to AdnKronos, the shooting of which has begun and which will go to theaters in 2023 to coincide with the centenary of the birth of the Maestro, “beloved all abroad and in the world of opera and highly contested in Italy and in the world of cinema “, he recalls. Rebel conformist sounds almost like an oxymoron … “But he was just like that – confirms Dell’Olio – anti-fascist and partisan but conservative, disliked by the nostalgic right and the official left, homosexual and Catholic, gay but against marriages between people of the same sex and anti-abortionist, a pupil of Visconti but emancipated from his figure, without being scratched by the political positions of the ‘red count’ … precisely: a conformist but rebellious, above all a man who has always remained faithful to himself, not an intellectual but a refined esthete “. For the docufilm, “in addition to a rich repertoire material, we will shoot in his Florence and in Rome. He was very attached to his hometown, even to his football team; and in Rome, in his villa on the Appia Antica he lived and hosted great personalities and also elderly actresses in financial difficulties: he was worldly and very generous but not a ‘feel-good’. Florentine to the core, but at the same time never provincial but with a universal spirit, a lover of Italy but with an international flair “. (by Enzo Bonaiuto)