AMERICA IN ROME

60s Italy: the fashion for spaghetti westerns is at its height. Before the gradual decline that took place during the 70s, the genre hit its peak in 1967-68, with 150 films being made over the two years. Together with ex-western actor and stunt man Guglielmo Spoletini (film name: William Bogart), the director sets off in search of the actors and stunt men who featured in these B-movie masterpieces. Working as parking-lot attendants, drivers, or simply enjoying a quiet retirement, they look back at the Roman youths they were, usually from quite modest backgrounds, and how one day they turned into the heroes of a fascinating, fictitious world, that of an imaginary America, invented in the Cinecitta studios. The aged actors, the deserted film studios and the "canyons" around Rome are all filmed in the same golden and red desert colours that characterized the films of thirty years ago. America in Rome is not only a sentimental, yet cheerful journey through the golden age of the unofficial side of Italian cinema, but also a history of 60s Italy, when, to afford an Alfa Romeo 2000, ordinary Romans became Mexican bandits and heroic cowboys in a cardboard cut-out America.