It is the greatest event of this edition: the 17th Festival has the honor of devoting a film series to one of the greatest authors in European cinema of the past half-century, the Georgian Otar Iosseliani (b. 1934), awarded at the Cannes (1968), Venice (1982, 1984, 1989 and 1992) and Berlin (2002) festivals. Iosseliani will be present at the competition. The author of Monday Morning, Winter Song (16th Festival’s Official Section) or Farewell, Home Sweet Home, has shaped for a half-century a filmography that celebrates life with cunning, tenderness and a rebellious spirit. A stylist of the daily life in long take, his films are satires that, more than storytelling, describe situations with a peculiar sense of humor. They are collective works, in which a picturesque variety of characters gets along in a kind of communal environment. Honorable and stubborn, each one of them asserts, despite all else, their freedom in the enjoyment of little pleasures. The result is a cinema exuding the “prose” of the world in cinematographic poetry. The selection of titles that, following instructions from the filmmaker himself, the Festival offers, will have screening copies on 35mm, at least most of them. At the Festival’s suggestion, other films will be added to the selection of his works, in this case directed by three masters one could consider his precursors: the classic René Clair, suggested by Iosseliani himself; the great Jacques Tati; and the recently deceased Jacques Etaix ―who, rather than a precursor, is an accomplice and brother in style, apart from being a close friend of the filmmaker; born in Tifflis, but settled in France since 1984. May this occasion serve, then, as a farewell to another great master.