Italy’s Turin Film Festival will celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday with a major retrospective of 24 films featuring Hollywood icons from the Golden Age.
Monroe, who was born Norma Jean Mortenson in 1926 and died of a barbiturate overdose at her Brentwood home in 1962 at the age of 36, will be honored at the fest with a mix of movies she appeared in and works about her, including Liz Garbus’ documentary Love, Marilyn and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s meditation on Monroe’s death, La Labia. According to a statement from the festival, she will “become the ultimate symbol of damaged modernity.”
Italy’s premier event for young directors and independent films, the Turin Film Festival brings together Marilyn Monroe classics such as Howard Hawks’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Henry Hathaway’s “How to Marry a Millionaire,” Otto Preminger’s “There’s No Job in Show Business,” Walter Lang’s “The Seven Year Itch” and Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot.” Portrayals such as “Blonde,” a Netflix film directed by Andrew Dominick, starring Ana de Armas as Monroe.
“This retrospective dedicated to Marilyn transports audiences to one of the most famous, beloved and misunderstood legends in the history of cinema,” Giulio Barze, the festival’s artistic director, said in a statement. “A face that belongs to a collective imagination like no other, but here its essence is expressed: the great classics of her career, the cinematic content of a film that not only made history, but continues to speak to the present through its formal precision, modernity of vision and interpretive power,” he added.
The 44th Turin Film Festival (the third edition organized by Base) will be held in Turin from November 24 to December 2, 2026.
