Name: Picasso: A Rebel in Paris
Start: 2024-07-07T13:00:00+10:00
Location: 105 William Street, Bathurst, NSW, Australia, New South Wales 2795

Anarchist, Stranger, Revolutionary: a new interpretation of the most amazing 20th Century artist 50 years after his death.
“Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation: it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us”. – Pablo Picasso
Early one morning in the year 1901, Picasso arrived in Paris.
And that’s the day his future began, in that city. Picasso was born in Spain in 1881 and would spend almost his entire life in Paris and yet, in the French capital, he would often feel like a stranger, an exile, under ‘special police surveillance’. Picasso. A Rebel in Paris. Story of a Life and a Museum starts here.
It tells the story of Pablo Picasso and takes an unprecedented, completely different look compared to the one we are used to. Made for the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of Picasso (Malaga, 25 October 1881 – Mougins, 8 April 1973), – directed by Simona Risi and based on a subject by Didi Gnocchi and Sabina Fedeli, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Arianna Marelli – this docufilm focuses on the story of a young immigrant, poor but destined to become one of the most important icons of the 20th century.
The film moves continuously in and out of the Musée Picasso in Paris, that has the largest existing collection dedicated to the painter with 6,000 masterpieces and 200,000 pieces of archive material, and follows Picasso through the Parisian neighborhoods where he lived, from the early days in ateliers with no heating to the large middle-class apartments where his success began: a physical and intellectual journey to gain a deeper understanding of his work and spirit.
Guiding us on this journey is Mina Kavani, the Iranian actress who starred in No Bears by Jafar Panahi, a dissident director who won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. Kavani arrived in Paris a few years ago, driven by the need to act without the censorship imposed by the ayatollahs’ regime.
A difficult choice made in the name of freedom, that now prevents her from being able to return to her country. Like Picasso, who could not and did not want to return to Spain during Francoism, she now lives the painful existence of an expatriate.