Ettore Scola

Ettore Scola's directing credit sits on every one of the twenty-one films here, which reach from 1964 to 2013. Deborah Young, in her Criterion appreciation of A Special Day, writes that the film passes on 6 May 1938, the day Adolf Hitler and his staff came to Rome on an official visit to Benito Mussolini. What it tells is a brief meeting between two lonely people: one of them knows they are different, the other only understands their own particularity at the end. On Young's account the cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis shot it in extremely faded colours and left behind the impression of a greyish-green aquarium. Vittorio Gassman stands in the cast of six of the films here. Le Bal took a directing Silver Bear at the 1984 Berlinale, and the same film won him the best director Cesar that year.