Domenica Scorsese Talks Almost Paris – And Taking The Economy Personally

Like Father, Not Like Daughter

A Conversation With Actress Turned Director Domenica Scorsese. The offspring of Martin Scorsese takes the economy personally in her first dramatic feature film, Almost Paris.

Delving into the current economic crisis in this country and the stock market disaster, reflected in the class tensions and divisions within one suburban family. And a title incidentally taking on new meaning with the current Paris uprisings.

Perhaps best known for her turn when just a teenager in father Martin Scorsese’s scary thriller, Cape Fear in 1991, Domenica phones in to Arts Express from the Tribeca Film Festival where her movie premiered.

And discussing her venture into filmmaking as dodging those stereotypical typecasting traps for actresses, of ‘the mother, the whore and the crone.’ Also, what Domenica and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver happen to have in common; and a secret she has to share about her father.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

Domenica Scorsese

Domenica Scorsese. photo c/o Domenica Scorsese.
Domenica Scorsese. photo c/o Domenica Scorsese.

Alessandro Rossellini Talks Viva Ingrid

The grandson of the late iconic director Roberto Rossellini is on the line from Rome to talk about the legacy of his eminent grandfather, and how he reinvented the existing landscape of cinema in the last century as the founder of the socio-economically fueled Neo-Realism – also known as the Golden Age of Italian Cinema.

And Alessandro, like Domenica, has embarked on his first film – a tribute to his grandfather’s muse and spouse Ingrid Bergman, in his short documentary Viva Ingrid.

Premiering at the Current Open Roads

New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center, the cinematic collage explores what Ingrid Bergman meant to both his family personally, and to the world. Including Rossellini’s vividly raw innovative filmmaking that led Bergman to depart Hollywood stardom, and her subsequent public persecution in the US for her relationship with Rossellini while both were still married to others – a denunciation and blacklisting reaching into the highest levels of the US government back then.

Our conversation touches as well on Karl Marx, McCarthyism, and how Roberto Rossellini’s venture into filmmaking first surprisingly flourished under Mussolini.

Arts Express: Thursdays 2pm ET: Airing on WBAI Radio in NY 99.5 FM, and streaming live and archived everywhere at wbai.org.

Prairie Miller is a New York multimedia journalist online, in print and radio, who reviews movies and conducts in-depth interviews. She can also be heard on WBAI/Pacifica National Radio Network’s Arts Express.