Fondazione Prada Renames Its Cinema After Jean-Luc Godard

From September 2023, Fondazione Prada’s movie theater is being renamed Cinema Godard to pay tribute to one of the most experimental and innovative directors in world cinematography, whose work has influenced generations of cinephiles, artists, and spectators. Cinema Godard is strengthening the link between the Franco-Swiss director and Fondazione Prada, for whom he conceived and realized “Le Studio d’Orphée” and “Accent-sœur,” his only permanent installations open to the public. From February to December 2023, Fondazione Prada devoted a retrospective to Godard, examining his vast and complex filmography.

Jean-Luc Godard | Foto Niccolo Quaresima

As stated by Miuccia Prada, “Cinema is a laboratory for new ideas and a space of cultural education—for this reason, we have decided to name our movie theater after Jean-Luc Godard. His work’s experimental and visionary power is a constant inspiration to renew our foundation’s commitment to spread cinematographic and visual languages and explore emerging narrative forms by activating a place where people can understand the world and their lives.”

From 1 September, Fondazione Prada relaunches its film proposal that explores the present and past movie landscape like an open and ever-changing festival. Werner Herzog and Rebecca Zlotowski will participate in two of the meetings open to the public that will inaugurate the new film season. The September program of Cinema Godard, curated by Paolo Moretti, will explore Herzog and Zlotowski filmographies through a selection of their works.

On Saturday, 16 September, French director and screenwriter Rebecca Zlotowski will be the focus of a conversation on her entire work, from her debut film Belle épine (Dear Prudence, 2010), which revealed Léa Seydoux and was selected at La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, to the more recent Les enfants des autres (Other People’s Children, 2022), which was presented in competition at the last Venice Film Festival. On Sunday, 17 September, German director and writer Werner Herzog will be the protagonist of a meeting with the public. On this occasion, he will present his latest film, The Fire Within: a requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022), dedicated to the well-known French volcanologists and filmmakers and distributed in Italian theaters by I Wonder Pictures, and the Italian premiere of Theater of Thought (2022), which explores the mystery of the human brain between neuroscientific and technological discoveries and their ethical and philosophical implications. In addition to Herzog’s two unreleased films, a selection of his documentary works from the 2000s onward will be presented, many of which have never been released theatrically in Italy.