2010 Levantine Cinema Arts Award Recipient
The Art and Science of the Rossellinis

“She is sometimes an awestruck little girl, sometimes a regal serenity, sometimes a bawdy beauty with a hair-trigger laugh and a taste for Grand Guignol. She’s always frank and practical, vulnerable and perceptive, refreshingly morbid and jaw-droppingly surprising.”
— Guy Maddin

Isabella Rossellini comes to Houston to receive the first Levantine Cinema Arts Award and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Rice Media Center (RMC). Her father, Roberto Rossellini, a friend and advisor to John and Dominique de Menil, was deeply involved in the founding and early years of the RMC. Between 1970 and 1976, Roberto Rossellini commuted from Rome to Houston once a month, speaking to Rice film students about his influential neo-realist and history films (including (Open City, Paisan, and Rise to Power of Louis XIV) and working with Rice faculty on a film for television called Science.

On Thursday, November 11, Isabella Rossellini will come to the Rice Cinema to introduce a screening of Roberto Rossellini’s classic Journey to Italy, starring her mother, Ingrid Bergman, as well as her own cinematic love letter to her father, My Dad is 100 Years Old. Also on the program will be a rare filmed interview with the de Menils, conducted by Roberto Rossellini, on their vision for the Rice Media Center.

On Friday night, November 12, Isabella Rossellini’s career as a successful actor, model, and director will be celebrated at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Isabella Rossellini - My Wild Life, an intimate portrait of her life and work, will be screened. The film delves into her relationship with her parents, her brilliant career as a model (over 500 covers, including Vogue, Elle, and Vanity Fair) and her success as an actor and muse to great directors, most famously David Lynch, who directed her Independent Spirit award-winning performance as Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet. The film reveals her lifelong passion for studying animal behavior and its manifestation in her new career as a film director. She is seen at work on her Webby Award-wining Sundance Channel series, Green Porno and Seduce Me, in which, in wild costumes, she performs the seductive and reproductive practices of fish and insects. Following My Wild Life, Rossellini will present a sampling of her favorite two-minute shorts from the Sundance Channel series and discuss the unusual combination of serious research, ecological conviction, and rude humor that characterize the project. She will also address the influence of her father on her passion for animals and the environment and present a rare screening, courtesy of the Library of Congress, of Roberto Rossellini’s second short film, Underwater Fantasy.

For the work she has done promoting and extending her father’s brilliant legacy, a significant part of which was rooted here in Houston, Isabella Rossellini is Cinema Arts Festival Houston’s honored recipient of the first Levantine Cinema Arts Award.