Special event at Giunti Odeon, with the screening of the latest extraordinary film by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. Giunti Odeon is the venue chosen by Gianikian for the continuation of a ‘tour’ that has seen the film screened in prestigious international cultural institutions such as the Venice Film Festival, the Cinémateque Française in Paris and the Fondazione Prada in Milan. The screening of the film will be preceded by a video presentation specially made for Giunti Odeon by Yervant Gianikian and the film's narrator, Lucrezia Lerro.

From the close encounter with Picasso's Guernica at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, where Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi went in 2014 to attend the screening of Pays Barbare, a ten-year project on the Spanish Civil War and the episodes in European history that contributed to the outbreak of that conflict was born. Commissioned by the Reina Sofía Museum and presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2023, Frente a Guernica is the latest stage in a coherent artistic journey that has made research, documentation and the collection of materials its tools for investigating history and memory.

‘The idea for the film Frente a Guernica, mine and Angela Ricci Lucchi's, stems from our visit to the Reina Sofia Museum on the occasion of the screening of Pays Barbare in 2014. The feelings we had about Picasso's work, after the exile of Guernica, prompted us to search for materials about Spain in our possession and described in notebooks. We did not have Robert Flaherty's film in 35mm, the work was at the MoMA in New York where Guernica remained for a long time. The film was given to us by the Reina Sofia Museum. In the film Frente a Guernica while Lucrezia Lerro, one of the two narrating voices, tells about the ‘case’ of Osip Mandelstam, I read both from Mikhail Koltsov's diary, about the arrival of the writers for the congress, and all the other captions of Frente a Guernica. This is the film that Angela Ricci Lucchi and I conceived, thought up together. Today I keep, once again, the promise I made to Angela, to continue our political, artistic, historical work on the violence of the 20th century'. (Yervant Gianikian)