As Artistic Director of the Italian Film Festival of Minneapolis/St. Paul, I feel we have a moral obligation to address what has been happening around us in the Twin Cities and to reflect that reality in this year’s programming. The distress and anxiety so many are carrying cannot be ignored.

To honor the Twin Cities, we chose to present two world-famous and two still largely unknown films in the United States by four of the most important Italian directors of all time, two men and two women. We hope these films can offer space to reflect, to find inspiration, and, at times, to serve as a warning. We also hope they can spark dialogue and help strengthen unity and community in a city that has been deeply strained.

The 17th Italian Film Festival of Minneapolis / St. Paul is honored to welcome Richard Peña to the Twin Cities. Mr. Peña will introduce, provide post-screening analysis, and moderate the Q&As for selected films in this year’s program.

Richard Peña is an Emeritus Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University, where he specialized in film theory and international cinema. From 1988 to 2012, he was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival. At the Film Society, Richard Peña organized retrospectives of many film artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, King Hu, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura, Nagisa Oshima and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Hong Kong, Arab, Korean, Swedish, Turkish, and Argentine cinema. In 2009, Peña co-curated at Lincoln Center the largest exhibition of early AfricanAmerican cinema ever organized. In 1995, together with Unifrance Film, he created “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema,” the most important showcase presented each year in North America, which continues today.

A frequent lecturer on film internationally, in 2014-2015, he was a Visiting Professor in Brazilian Studies at Princeton; in 2015-2016 a Visiting Professor in Film Studies at Harvard; and in 2022 a Visiting Professor in Art History at La Sorbonne. He has also taught courses at Beijing University, Gedai Art Institute (Tokyo), la Universidad de Cine (Buenos Aires), the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Universidad Católica de Chile, and the University of São Paulo. In May 2016, he was the recipient of the “Cathedra Bergman” award at UNAM inMexico City, where he offered a three-part lecture series “On the Margins of American Cinema.” In 2024, he was the Walt Disney Professor of American Art and Culture at Tsinghua University in Beijing, in Spring 2025 was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Qatar, and in Fall 2025, a Visiting Professor at Hong Kong University. A series he curated, on silent US “race movies,”will be presented at the Pathé Foundation in Paris in April, 2026.