The 44th Torino Film Festival, directed for the third time by Giulio Base, will revolve around Marilyn Monroe, who will be the focus of the coordinated image and the retrospective.
Considered one of the most renowned film icons of all time, Marilyn Monroe became famous thanks to her breathtaking beauty, her style, and her complex personality. The star of successful movies, she embodied the image of the femme fatale and the sexy star. Her private life, which was marked by stormy marriages and personal struggles, contributed to her myth, as did her premature death at only 36 years of age, which added an aura of legend.
In the words of Giulio Base, Director of the Torino Film Festival: “After two, justly-celebrated centenaries – Brando in 2024 and Newman in 2025 – in 2026, the retrospective will be dedicated to a woman, on the one hundredth anniversary of her birth: Marilyn Monroe. Not only an actress, but a legend, a luminous icon in our collective imaginary. The image chosen for the 44th Torino Film Festival is taken from her last photo shoot, made just a few days before she died: a shot that encapsulates beauty and fragility, with that vague sense of nostalgia for the future, as though she knew she was destined to live more in eternity than in the present.”
The picture that was chosen was taken by the photographer George Barris in Santa Monica in 1962, part of a service known as “The Last Photos.” In 1997, at an auction in Los Angeles, the National Museum of Cinema of Turin purchased three photographic prints of the portraits that were taken on the beach; the prints are signed by the photographer and are on display in the Mole Antonelliana in a corner dedicated to the diva Marilyn, along with other photos, personal objects, and jewelry.
Photo by George Barris © INHOLLYWOODLAND™ LLC – The Estate of George Barris
