The film was also banned from movie theatres, due to the refusal of Angelo Rizzoli to distribute it, and was condemned to oblivion. Italian state television RAI refused to broadcast the film, as it was considered too anticlerical and therefore politically dangerous. When summoned to Rome to defend himself against the accusation of heresy, he was asked by Cardinal Bellarmino and the Pope himself to defer his studies and was compelled to forswear the Copernican theory in which he had firmly believed.įirst presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1968, in the year of the student protests, the film experienced itself the kind of censorship it portrays. Through lengthy studies, Galileo became convinced that it is the sun, and not the earth, that is at the centre of the universe. This is where Giordano Bruno’s heretical ideas and the sun-centred Copernican theory began to take shape. Shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, the film retraces the story of Galileo Galilei, starting from the early years of his scientific career at the end of the 16th century, when he moved to Padua to teach Physics at the University. The film has been restored by the National Film Archive of the Experimental Cinematography Centre in Rome, and, after over 40 years, reopens the age-old debate about the relationship between faith and science. Among the titles included in this section, there is also Galileo (1968), by the celebrated Italian director Liliana Cavani. Beside the major sections of the festival, the retrospective section evocatively named “These Phantoms” has shed a light on some lost masterpieces of Italian cinema.
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