On the occasion of Werner Herzog being awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival, Giunti Odeon celebrates one of cinema's greatest masters with a screening of his most famous film, starring the unforgettable Klaus Kinski. The passion of adventurer Brian Sweeny Fitzgerald, known as Fitzcarraldo, is opera. His obsession is to build an opera house in Iquitos, where he lives, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. In order to achieve his goal, he agrees to lead an expedition by boat to a rich area of rubber trees that he intends to exploit, and attempts desperate feats to transport a ship across the mountains.

Herzog's magnum opus, Fitzcarraldo, more than forty years after its release, is even more striking today than it was yesterday, thanks to its grandiose visuals and powerful staging. Like the great visionaries of the Seventh Art, the German director seems willing to stop at nothing to bring his cinematic fresco to life. What today would be simply solved with computers or digital effects, and what yesterday was achieved with the help of models, Herzog wants in reality, as if he were searching for images “unspoiled” by globalisation, capable of exuding blood and mud, tears and sweat. But beyond all this, Fitzcarraldo also culminates the director's sincere desire to conclude a discourse already begun and carried forward step by step in his previous works. It is a harangue of disconcerting depth in favour of “diversity”, exemplified here in the presentation of the Indians seen as a “workforce” by the whole Western world and in the re-proposal of yet another character of the “mad” dreamer, played with unsurpassed mastery by Klaus Kinski. A discourse, therefore, that speaks of the ability of the “different” to force us to understand ourselves. Because in Herzog's almost “Nietzschean” vision, when we look into that abyss that is the gaze of others, it is the abyss that looks into us and reveals the truth.