Torino Chief on His Stellar Lineup With John Travolta, Pamela Anderson and Isabelle Huppert, and Why a ‘Festival Is Like an Art Gallery’

John Travolta, Isabelle Huppert, Pamela Anderson and Josh Safdie will be among the honorees at the 44th Torino Film Festival, running Nov. 24 – Dec. 2 in the Piedmontese capital.

Tributes will also go to Luc Besson, Fanny Ardant, Margarethe von Trotta, Stephen Frears, Mike Newell, Maria de Medeiros, Andy Garcia and Mira Sorvino. Special guests include Chiwetel Ejiofor, Abel Ferrara, Asia Argento, Albert Serra and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, each presenting new or classic work.

As per tradition, 12 career achievement awards will be presented, all shaped like the Stella della Mole, the 12-point sculpture atop Turin’s Museo Nazionale del Cinema and an emblem of both the city and the event. Travolta, among the first honorees announced, will join director Roland Joffé to open the 44th edition with the international premiere of the JFK assassination drama “November 1963.”

“John Travolta is one of cinema’s great legends,” says artistic director Giulio Base. “For half a century, he has moved effortlessly through film history with class and elegance, but he’s never seemed distant. People feel he is part of their family, their history, their lives. Few actors can claim to have altered the very culture, but the way he walked the streets of New York at the start of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ changed the way people moved. I remember how every guy tried to imitate him. That kind of influence is rare.”

“Personally, I’ve loved him since I was a boy,” Base continues, recalling the “fever” around “Grease” and the near riots at its Turin premiere. “People were fighting to get in, and I was part of that mass!”

Fittingly, that 1978 premiere was held at the Teatro Regio, where Travolta and fellow honorees will accept their lifetime achievement trophies on opening night.

Three editions into his five-year mandate, Base has established a populist streak, encouraging guests to spend as much time as possible with local audiences and gravitating toward luminaries with proven crowd appeal. Speaking with Variety ahead of this year’s lineup announcement, he draws a throughline between honorees Mike Newell and Stephen Frears, filmmakers who “move across worlds, eras and genres with exceptional flair” while displaying “the same extraordinary ability to win over audiences.”

Safdie offers a more recent example. Though the “Marty Supreme” director was unable to attend his film’s surprise screening at last year’s festival, the evening remains a touchstone for the kind of communal experience that first sparked Base’s own cinephilia, and one he now hopes to recreate.

“The screening was crazy,” Base says. “Obviously a full house, but later, outside, people stayed there for an hour talking. Young guys, students, professors, talking about the movie like in the old times. It was something really special that touched people. An Italian journalist wrote me an email saying this was probably the greatest night of the festival, and I replied with a silly emoji, but later I thought he might be right!”

One of Base’s signature initiatives is Zibaldone, a program that brings together restorations, tributes, special screenings and premieres under a name borrowed from poet Giacomo Leopardi’s celebrated miscellany. Its eclectic spirit is reflected in this year’s honorees, who span arthouse figures such as von Trotta, the first woman to win the Golden Lion, and global crowd-pleasers such as Besson, whom Base calls “a French director who has conquered the world.”

The lineup also embraces French cinema icons Huppert and Ardant, alongside Canadian-born pop-culture phenomenon Anderson, whose leaps from B-movies to studio comedies to contemporary auteur fare perhaps best capture the Zibaldone spirit.

“Pamela Anderson is another dream come true for me,” Base says. “Her career looks like a cocktail where somebody mixes different types of liquor and it still tastes good. She had the courage to reinvent herself, surprising those who thought they already knew her. She’s an example of how to succeed and transform.”

Base has himself transformed the festival with an eye toward audience accessibility, streamlining both its selection and geographical footprint.

“As a programmer, I don’t like festivals where there’s an abundance of everything,” he says. “I think a festival is like an art gallery, where every work has its own space and can be appreciated by whoever walks through.”

Between the opening and closing galas at the historic Teatro Regio, honorees will meet local audiences for Q&As at two cinemas just 500 meters apart in the city center. Both venues hold personal significance for Base — he had his first job at one and his first kiss at the other — but the decision to keep the festival within such a compact area also reflects a more practical concern.

“As a moviegoer, you have to think about when a screening finishes and when you can grab something to eat,” he explains. “It’s so much easier when everything is close by. Then you can watch as many movies as you want without worrying about the time.”