With “Belligerent Eyes” Fondazione Prada, restlessly searching for new grounds of confrontation on cinema and visual languages, experiments with new forms of collaboration, analysis and research. “Belligerent Eyes” was born out the Fondazione’s will to create a reciprocally stimulating exchange with younger generations working in the realms of cinema and visual arts research and production, enabling them to work in complete autonomy and freedom. This new relationship has marked independence as the core of such an artistic collaboration, offering the Fondazione the opportunity to re-invent the expressions of its cultural commitment.

This project extends the research Fondazione Prada has sustained in the realm of cinema for more than a decade. Between 2003 and 2006 important collaborations with international institutions such as the Tribeca Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival were developed. In 2004 the groundbreaking program of the Tribeca Film Festival travelled outside the USA for the first time and audiences in Milan were offered the opportunity to attend the screenings of selected films from the festival, along with talks and Q&As with directors and actors. In the following years, a vast film restoration project was initiated in collaboration with the Venice Biennale, with the aim to rediscover forgotten or overlooked cinematographic heritage. From 2004 to 2005, during three editions of the Venice Film Festival, the retrospectives “Italian Kings of the Bs: The Secret History of Italian Cinema”, “The Secret History of Asian Cinema” and “The Secret History of Russian Cinema”, all curated by Marco Müller, were presented in Venice and subsequently travelled to Milan, London, New York, Melbourne and Tokyo. In addition to this, in the past years Fondazione Prada has realized special commissions by artists such as Steve McQueen and Tobias Rehberger, who have employed cinematographic imagery and languages to conceive exhibitions and site-specific projects.

With the opening of its new Milan venue in May 2015, Fondazione Prada has strengthened its commitment to this artistic discipline. The new Cinema building has hosted “Roman Polanski: My Inspirations”, a documentary-interview in which the film director retraced his creative path, accompanied by a selection of his own films as well as masterpieces from the past, and “Flesh, Mind and Spirit”, a festival comprising 15 films chosen by director Alejandro González Iñárritu, in collaboration with Elvis Mitchell, film critic and Curator at LACMA in Los Angeles. Director Wes Anderson, on the other hand, conceived Bar Luce for the new Milan site, where he recreated the atmosphere of a typical Milanese cafè, reminiscent of Italian popular culture and aesthetics from the 1950s and 1960s and of the cinematographic iconography of masterpieces such as Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951) by Vittorio De Sica and Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) by Luchino Visconti.

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Belligerent Eyes press kit - italian
Belligerent Eyes press kit - english