Torino Film Festival Claims Marilyn Monroe Centenary First

By Daniel Okafor

The Torino Film Festival will mark Marilyn Monroe's centenary with a 24-film retrospective, announced before the 2025 edition even closed. Artistic director Giulio Base wanted the bragging rights. He got them.

2026 marks 100 years since Monroe's birth, and Base moved early to stake the claim. "I really wanted to be the first to announce a retrospective," he said. "I knew this would be the anniversary year, and I knew others might be thinking the same."

The gambit paid off twice over, giving Base's team a focal point for the new program.

What's on the program?

The lineup stretches well beyond Monroe's own filmography, and for a practical reason. Her career was brief, with too few leading roles to fill a schedule.

"Screening a movie where she has only a scene that isn't even relevant would be a pity," Base said. "So we decided to understand her complete legend, including the movies that celebrate her, or research her life, her problems, her traumas, her faults and her dreams."

The selection includes:

• Classics: "The Seven Year Itch," "How to Marry a Millionaire," "Some Like It Hot"
• Revisionist takes: Andrew Dominik's "Blonde" and the Pasolini-Guareschi documentary "La Rabbia"
• Echoes across six decades, including work by guests of honor Luc Besson ("Dogman") and Mira Sorvino ("Norma Jean & Marilyn")

The Monroe thread even reaches this year's opener, Roland Joffé's "November 1963," starring fellow honoree John Travolta. "In one sequence they go to a nightclub and there's a Marilyn impersonator singing," Base said. "I was almost screaming in the screening room. That's such a great connection, helping our program look like a complete piece and not just a mosaic."

Honoree Pamela Anderson, platinum-blond and very much in the Monroe lineage, rounds out the festival's totem pole.

Why an icon matters

Base frames the retrospective as part of a broader push to democratize the festival. When he took over, Torino was, in his words, "prestigious but niche."

"As a moviegoer, I think stars make everybody feel at home," he said. "Big stars like [previous retrospective subjects] Marlon Brando and Paul Newman make people approach the festival without feeling out of place."

Previous subjects Brando and Paul Newman did the same job, welcoming audiences who don't know 1940s Korean cinema. "So it's important to have an icon, a symbol, a totem, that makes us feel we're all equal," Base said.

The case for Monroe the actress

Unlike Brando or Newman, Monroe never reached old age. Her legend was shaped substantially by her untimely death, and Base designed the retrospective to work on two levels: challenging preconceived notions for skeptics, offering discovery for newcomers.

His touchstone is a quote from Lee Strasberg, the Actors Studio master who taught some of the greatest actors of the twentieth century. Strasberg, Base recalled, called Monroe "the female Marlon Brando."

"She was so profound, and so literate," Base said. "She was a great reader whose poetry, notes and diaries reveal a deep intellectual, adept at playing the ditz for the heavy fun of those of us who bought in. So I hope the new generations will discover the great actress beyond the big icon."

That's the thesis, then: Monroe the reader, not just the poster.

What comes after 2026?

Don't expect an equally early announcement next year. The 1927 birth cohort offers a thinner marquee: Sidney Poitier and Peter Falk are worthy candidates, Base allows; Roger Moore and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, perhaps less so.

Instead, he's eyeing further ahead. "I have ideas for 2027 already, but I won't say anything now," he said. "It's too soon, and it's not so simple, like with Marilyn."

The Monroe retrospective, meanwhile, does the quiet ideological work: a festival once niche betting its future on the most famous face in cinema history.