US, Italy, Morocco, France, 1952, 90’
directed by: Orson Welles
written by: Orson Welles
cast: Orson Welles, Micheál MacLiammóir, Suzanne Cloutier, Robert Coote, Fay Compton, Michael Laurence, Doris Dowling
cinematography: Anchise Brizzi, G. R. Aldo, George Fanto
edited by: John Shepridge, Jean Sacha, Renzo Lucidi, William Morton
producers: Orson Welles
Cannes Film Festival 1952 – Grand Prix of the Festival
Made in a broken rhythm over a period of three years, Welles's Othello marked the director's breakup with the Hollywood-style production. After studio big shots had "rearranged" each and every film he had made after Citizen Kane – including Macbeth, his earlier adaptation of a Shakespeare drama – Welles decided to finance his next project on his own. He kept the outlines of the story about Venetian general Othello who meets his doom after his "right-hand man" Iago tricks him into believing that his wife Desdemona has been unfaithful – but he rearranged the text in order to blend the bard's vision and his own. It resulted in one of visually most imaginative and certainly most impressive adaptations of a Shakespearian drama. It won Grand Prix in Cannes in 1952.
Orson Welles (1915 – 1985) is one of the most important persons of the 20th century. This superior intellectual, director, actor and writer, magician and radio host, playwright, painter and poet left his trace in Croatia, too. This is a unique opportunity to see some well-known, some less known and some unknown films and footages that this creative genius made in his lifetime, some of them in our country. The hundredth anniversary of his birth and thirtieth anniversary of his death are an opportunity to see what it is like when a top artist makes top art – often against all odds.
