The dust had barely settled on last year’s Torino Film Festival when artistic director Giulio Base began plotting his next move.
2026 would mark the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, and Base was determined not to be beaten to it. “I really wanted to be the first to announce a retrospective,” he says. “I knew this would be the anniversary year, and I knew others might be thinking the same.”
The gambit paid off twice over. Announced just before the 2025 festival closed, the showcase staked Torino’s claim and gave Base’s team a focal point around which to build the new program.
This year’s 24-film lineup stretches well beyond Monroe’s own filmography. Classics like “The Seven Year Itch,” “How to Marry a Millionaire” and “Some Like It Hot” sit alongside revisionist takes such as Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde” and Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giovanni Guareschi’s documentary “La Rabbia” because the star’s relatively brief career simply didn’t offer enough leading roles to fill the schedule.
“Screening a movie where she has only a scene that isn’t even relevant would be a pity,” Base says. “So we decided to understand her complete legend, including the movies that celebrate her, or research her life, her problems, her traumas, her faults and her dreams.”
The program also traces her influence across the six decades since her death, finding echoes in films by guests of honor Luc Besson (“Dogman”) and Mira Sorvino (“Norma Jean & Marilyn”). Wherever the team looked, well, there she was, sharing her platinum-blond ‘do with honoree Pamela Anderson and casting new light on Roland Joffé’s “November 1963,” this year’s festival opener.
“In one sequence they go to a nightclub and there’s a Marilyn impersonator singing,” Base says of the film, which stars another Torino honoree, John Travolta. “I was almost screaming in the screening room. That’s such a great connection, helping our program look like a complete piece and not just a mosaic.”
Beyond the simple pleasure of great films on the big screen, Base sees Monroe’s ubiquity as a way to advance a broader effort to democratize the festival.
“When I started as director, our festival was known as prestigious but niche,” he explains. “But as a moviegoer, I think stars make everybody feel at home. Big stars like [previous retrospective subjects] Marlon Brando and Paul Newman make people approach the festival without feeling out of place. They welcome those beyond the inner circle, those who don’t know about Korean cinema of the 1940s or the history of movies. So it’s important to have an icon, a symbol, a totem, that makes us feel we’re all equal.”
Unlike Newman or Brando, Monroe never reached old age, and her legend was shaped in no small part by her untimely death. Base has therefore designed the retrospective to work on two levels: challenging those with limited or preconceived notions of Monroe, while offering newcomers a chance to discover her work.
“I always remember Lee Strasberg, that great master who taught some of the greatest actors in the world, saying that Marilyn Monroe was the female Marlon Brando,” he says. “She was so profound, and so literate. She was a great reader whose poetry, notes and diaries reveal a deep intellectual, adept at playing the ditz for the heavy fun of those of us who bought in. So I hope the new generations will discover the great actress beyond the big icon.”
Base is unlikely to announce next year’s tribute quite so early, as the 1927 birth cohort offers a less obvious marquee draw (Sidney Poitier and Peter Falk are certainly worthy of consideration; Roger Moore and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, perhaps less so).
Instead, he hints at plans for a more distant anniversary. “I have ideas for 2027 already, but I won’t say anything now,” he says. “It’s too soon, and it’s not so simple, like with Marilyn.”