Portrait of Gina

Orson Welles shot this film as a pilot for a TV series about “places and people”. It was supposed to be “an interview show completely different from everything presented so far”. The meeting with Gina Lollobrigida is just an excuse for travelling through Italy, talking to colleagues like Rossano Brazzi and Vittorio De Sica about the ups and downs in their professional lives, discussing Italian customs with his wife Paola Mori and interviewing Lollobrigida’s pen friend Anna Gruber. Foreshadowing the style of his late masterpiece F For Fake, the film was rejected by American TV stations and never aired. The only surviving copy was discovered shortly after Welles’ death in the mid 1980s. (Venice International Film Festival)