Part I Saturday, September 15, 7 p.m. (160 min.)
Part II Sunday, September 16, 1 p.m. (90 min.)

Bernardo Bertolucci’s most ambitious work, 1900 (shown in two parts) is a historical epic revolving around two boys born on the same day in 1901: Alfredo (Robert De Niro), the son of a wealthy padrone; and Olmo (Gérard Depardieu), the son of one of the padrone’s day laborers. Their story winds through approximately 50 years of Italian history, with Olmo embracing socialism and Alfredo becoming an unwitting defender of fascism and an inadvertent propagator of brutal crimes against the laborers for whom he once held much affection.

"I became aware as I was making the film, and especially during its editing, that 1900​ is constructed on the principle of contradictions: the contradiction between American dollars and the ideological and political discourse of the film, the contradiction between Olmo and Alfredo, between peasants and landowners, between Hollywood actors and the authentic peasants of Emilia, between fiction and documentary, between the most detailed preparation and the wildest improvisation, between an archaic peasant culture and a truly bourgeois culture. It's true that in film everything becomes symbolic, and yet, at the same time, cinematic language is one that has the least recourse to symbols: at tree is a tree, a house is a house - this very specific tree and this very specific house - and Attila is Attila. That's why I never used stock newsreel footage in ​1900. ​I never showed fascism in general but only the fascism that existed within a twenty kilometer radius of the farm, the village, and the neighboring town. Also, from another point of view, I wanted to go beyond strictly Italian fascism and that's why I chose Donald Sutherland to play the part of Attila rather than an Italian actor." - Bernardo Bertolucci