Anton Giulio Onofri e Mario Sesti

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Released in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey was not merely a masterpiece of sci-fi cinema—it was a total sensory experience, a visual and sonic journey that the psychedelic movement immediately adopted as its own manifesto. Movie theaters filled with spectators returning to watch it multiple times, drawn to the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" star-gate sequence as if it were a door opening into another dimension of consciousness.

In this event, film critic Mario Sesti and musicologist Anton Giulio Onofri will explore Kubrick’s film on two parallel and inseparable levels: images and music. How do you build such a powerful dialogue between the camera and the score? In what ways did Kubrick select and re-interpret Strauss, Ligeti, and Khachaturian, transforming classical music into something cosmic and uncanny? And how does all of this fit into the cultural and counter-cultural context of the 1960s?

The conversation will then expand to other titles in Kubrick's filmography, exploring the common thread binding image and sound throughout the career of one of the twentieth century's most visionary directors.

An event for cinephiles, music lovers, and anyone who wants to understand why, more than fifty years later, 2001 still feels like a film from the future.

Anton Giulio Onofri was born in Rome in 1959. A writer and director for Rai and Mediaset on several cultural television programs in the 1990s, with the turn of the new century he decided to leave behind ephemeral TV schedules to independently produce video and documentary films on classical music, art, and literature that would stand the test of time. From 2013 to 2023, he hosted the program La Classica Domanda on Sky Classica. He curates the film and culture column La Bussola di Ago on ArtsLife.com. A passionate photographer, his work has been exhibited in several major Italian museums. With Timìa Edizioni, he published Roma Città Chiusa, a photo-reportage shot during the 2020 lockdown, and A casa di Hans, a photographic exploration of composer Hans Werner Henze's legendary home before it was cleared out after his death. With Corrimano Edizioni, he published La prima estate e altri racconti (2019) and the pamphlet Io e Pasolini (2022). His debut novel, Lo splendore e la scimmia, was released in 2013 and has now been reissued in a new "redux" edition.

Mario Sesti was among the creators and curators of the Rome Film Fest and has directed Adriatico Cinema and the Taormina Film Fest. He is a film critic, screenwriter, and director whose films have been selected for festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Locarno, and Turin, as well as the MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York. He has won two Nastri d’Argento awards for his documentaries, and two of his books have been named Best Film Book of the Year. He is currently the artistic director of the Premio Film Impresa and the Attorstudio Milazzo Film Festival.