The Red Sea International Film Festival (RSIFF) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia will wrap up its third edition next month with a closing-night gala screening on Dec. 7 of Ferrari, the biopic from Michael Mann starring Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, Shailene Woodley and Patrick Dempsey.
Organizers on Wednesday also unveiled the lineup for the International Spectacular program, which presents “cinema from around the globe and features celebrated auteurs and international filmmaking icons.” The festival highlighted that the section “showcases some of the most highly anticipated and talked about films of the year, screened for the first time in the Arab world.”
The International Spectacular program will also feature Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla, Ava Duvernay’s Origin, John Woo’s Silent Night, Léa Domenach’s Bernadette (The President’s Wife), which sees Catherine Deneuve starring as former French first lady Bernadette Chirac, Aardman’s Sam Fell-directed Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, and Yann Mounir Demange’s short Dammi, starring Riz Ahmed. Iconic Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron will screen as the public closing film.
Mohammed Al-Turki, CEO of the Red Sea Film Foundation, said about Ferrari: “This exhilarating film has been close to the festival’s ‘heart,’ as it has been supported by our Red Sea International Film Financing, a vehicle for us to champion acclaimed storytellers and create the opportunity for cultural exchange. Michael Mann’s powerful film shows true craftsmanship and empathy for the ambitious genius behind one of the world’s most desired works of design.”
Added Kaleem Aftab, director of international programming for the festival: “Ferrari is Michael Mann in overdrive. It’s a story about passion, love, and business where the cars are as beautiful as the film – which we loved from the moment we first saw it! This visually rich film serves as an exhilarating close to both this year’s festival and the International Strand, for which we have gathered up the most exciting, groundbreaking and moving features from this year’s festival circuit.”
Ferrari is set in the summer of 1957 when Formula 1 ex-racer Enzo Ferrari (Driver) is in crisis. “Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura, built from nothing 10 years earlier. Their volatile marriage is shattered by the loss of their son, Dino,” reads the plot description for the movie, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival. “Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son Piero with Lina Lardi. Meanwhile, his drivers’ passions to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.”
With a screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin, Ferrari has been adapted from the 1991 biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by motorsport journalist Brock Yates.
