The dust had barely settled on last year’s Turin Film Festival when artistic director Giulio Base began planning his next move.
2026 would be the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, and Base was determined not to be defeated. “I really wanted to be the first person to announce a retrospective exhibition,” he says. “I knew this would be the anniversary year, and I knew others might think the same.”
The gamble paid off twice. Announced just before the 2025 festival closed, the event supported Torino’s claim and gave Base’s team a focal point from which to build the new programme.
This year’s roster of 24 films extends far 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 like Andrew Dominik’s “The Blonde” and Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giovanni Guareschi’s documentary “La Rabbia” because the star’s relatively short career didn’t offer enough leading roles to fill the calendar.
“It would be a shame to watch a movie with only one irrelevant scene,” says Base. “So we decided to understand his entire legend, including the films that commemorate him, or delve into his life, his problems, his traumas, his mistakes and his dreams.”
The program also traces his influence over the six decades since his death, finding echoes in the films of honored guests Luc Besson (“Dogman”) and Mira Sorvino (“Norma Jean & Marilyn”). Wherever the team looked, there he was; She shared her platinum blonde look with honorary winner Pamela Anderson and shed new light on Roland Joffé’s festival opener, “November 1963.”
“In one scene, they go to a nightclub and a Marilyn impersonator is singing,” Base says of the film, which stars another Turin award winner, John Travolta. “I almost screamed in the screening room. This is a great link; It helps our program look like a whole piece, not just a mosaic.”
Beyond the simple pleasure of great films on the big screen, Base sees Monroe’s ubiquity as a way to further a broader effort to democratize the festival.
“When I started as a director, our festival was known as a prestigious but niche festival,” he explains. “But as a moviegoer, I think stars make everyone feel at home. Like big stars [previous retrospective subjects] Marlon Brando and Paul Newman allow people to approach the festival without feeling unfamiliar. They welcome those outside the immediate circle, those unfamiliar with 1940s Korean cinema or film history. That’s why it’s important to have a symbol, a symbol, a totem that makes us all feel equal.”
Unlike Newman or Brando, Monroe never aged, and much of her legend was shaped by her untimely death. So Base designed the retrospective to work on two levels: It challenges those with limited or preconceived ideas about Monroe, while offering newcomers a chance to explore her work.
“I always remember Lee Strasberg, the great master who trained some of the world’s greatest actors, saying that Marilyn Monroe was the female Marlon Brando,” he says. “She was very profound and very literate. She was a great reader whose poems, notes and diaries reveal a profound intellectual, adept at playing the ditz for the intense entertainment of those of us who believed in her. So I hope that new generations will discover the great actress beyond the great icon.”
It’s unlikely the base will announce next year’s commemoration this early, as the 1927 birth cohort offers a less obvious frame draw (Sidney Poitier and Peter Falk are definitely worth considering; Roger Moore and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, perhaps less so).
Instead, it hints at plans for a more distant anniversary. “I already have ideas for 2027, but I won’t say anything now,” he says. “It’s still too early and it’s not that simple as it was with Marilyn.”