The Fabelmans intrigues upon its release

The Fabelmans arrive at the Rome Film Festival in co-production with Alice nella città, an absolute and highly anticipated preview as any Steven Spielberg autobiographical film would be. And it’s still the same filmmaker who writes the screenplay for the film with the collaboration of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, his long-time collaborator. The theatrical release date is set for December 15.

For this project, the Hollywood master sets aside science fiction and action, predominant genres in his career, to try his hand at a work that will be defined by himself: “the most personal I have ever made “. Very interesting, then, the choice of the director to have wanted to center the narrative line of the film on a precise period of his life: from his childhood until the beginning of adolescence. This aspect has certainly allowed him to be able to further explore the origin of his great passion: cinema. Les Fabelman, who has already won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival, should mark another milestone in the director’s long and extraordinary career.

(left to right) Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) in The Fabelmans, co-written and directed by Steven Spielberg.

Synopsis The Fabelmans

The Fabelmans begin with a child Spielberg, played by character and alter ego Sammy Fabelman, then end with a sixteen-year-old Spielberg (Gabriel LaBelle). From the story of the film, it is clear how various events in his life helped influence the discovery of his vocation for cinema. A passion that first appears in the eyes of little Fabelman as something frightening, but at the same time highly fascinating.

It all begins, in fact, when the child enters a cinema with his parents for the first time. And seeing on the big screen the images of a train traveling at full speed hitting a car on the tracks, he is deeply affected. So much so that, once back home, he will feel the need to reproduce the same scenario with toy models given to him by his father (Paul Dano). At this stage, it will be up to the mother, pianist and art lover, (Michelle Williams) to play a fundamental role when she proposes to the child to capture these images in a camera.

A passion that later in adolescence also turns into something harmful, when accidentally through one of his videos he learns a dangerous secret about his family. We stop there so as not to fall into pure spoilers.