Italy’s National Cinema Museum in the northern city of Turin has named former Berlin Film Festival head Carlo Chatrian as its new director. Chatrian will be in post for five years.
Chatrian replaces Domenico De Gaetano. The museum’s management committee thanked De Gaetano in a statement this afternoon for leading the institution during recent “complex years” and “succeeding in the enterprise of increasing visitors and making it an attractive cultural center of international standing, opening it to the new languages of cinema.”
The committee said the decision to hire Chatrian was “unanimous.” Chatrian, a Turin native, began his cinema career as a writer and journalist. He has been a programmer and consultant for various institutions including the National Cinema Museum in Turin, Filmmaker Doc in Milan, Alba International Film Festival (of which he was also deputy director), Courmayeur Noir in Festival, Festival dei popoli in Florence, Cinéma du Réel in Paris, Cinémathèque suisse in Lausanne, and Visions du Réel in Nyon.
From 2012 to 2018, he was the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, and from 2020 to 2024 artistic director of the Berlin Film Festival. Chatrian stepped down from his role at the Berlinale after the German government announced plans to scrap the festival’s short-lived dual management structure. Chatrian led the festival alongside Mariette Rissenbeek, who ran logistics, while he programmed films. Over 300 film professionals, including Martin Scorsese, Olivier Assayas, Joanna Hogg, and Radu Jude signed an open letter calling for Chatrian’s contract to be reinstated and extended at the time.
Italy’s National Cinema Museum was created in 2009 and is housed in the vast atrium of Turin’s architectural landmark the Mole Antonelliana. The building was built in the same era as Paris’s Eiffel Tower and originally commissioned by the city’s Jewish community as a synagogue, but when the architect Alessandro Antonelli’s ambitious ideas exhausted their budget, the city stepped in to fund its completion. Alongside its permanent collection, it runs temporary exhibitions.
“I welcome this new adventure with enthusiasm,” Chatrian said today of his appointment. “I can’t wait to start working with the Museum staff and to support their expertise and professionalism by putting at the service of this institution, which I feel close to, the knowledge gained in years of work abroad and the passion that has always driven me.”