Pope Francis The Film Buff: Pontiff Cited Federico Fellini’s ‘La Strada’ As Favorite Movie

Pope Francis, who died on the age of 88 on Easter Monday, had a special relationship with cinema going back to his childhood in Buenos Aires.

“I owe my cinema culture above all to my parents who took us to the cinema a lot,” the pontiff said in 2013 interview, a few months after his election as head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in the Argentinian capital in 1936 to parents with roots in northern Italy, Italian cinema figured highly in his early cinema-going.

In the same 2013 interview, Pope Francis named Federico Fellini’s 1954 Oscar-winning film La Strada, starring Giulietta Masina as fragile protagonist Gelsomina who is abused by brutish circus strongman Zampanò, played by Anthony Quinn, as the film he loved the most.

“I identify with that film, in which there is an implicit reference to Saint Francis,” said the pontiff referring to its themes of love and suffering echoed in the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi, from whom he took his papal name.

Pope Francis recorded a special video message last May to mark the 70th anniversary of the release of La Strada, in which he again discussed his love of the film.

“As a child I saw many films by Fellini, but La Strada always stayed in my heart. The film that begins with tears and ends with tears, begins on the seashore and ends on the seashore, but what stayed with me most was the scene with the madman and the stone in which he gives meaning to the life of the girl.”

The pontiff was also a fan of Italian neorealism and cited Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 wartime classic Rome, Open City as another film that had marked him as a child, saying he had seen all the pictures featuring its stars Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi.

He later suggested that post-War Two cinema had played its part in healing and reconciling people in the wake of the conflict.

“Cinema is a great tool for bringing people together. Especially in the post-war period, it contributed in an exceptional way to the rebuilding of the social fabric,” he told the Catholic Cinema Operators Association in 2019.

The pontiff would also often refer to films to illustrate a spiritual or ecumenical point.

In his 2016 Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) missive, addressing the Catholic Church’s position on family, he alluded to the 1987 Danish Oscar winner Babette’s Feast, highlighting the protagonist’s joy at selflessly giving joy to others through the sumptuous meal she prepares.

Other films cited in his addresses included Akira Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August, in reference to the church’s teachings on the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 picture Andrei Rublëv, about the 15th century icon artist who stopped creating due to the trauma of war.

Figures from the world of film and entertainment were regularly invited to his papal audiences including Angelina Jolie (following a screening of her film Unbroken), George Clooney, Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Italian Oscar winner Roberto Benigni to name a few, as well as more than 100 comedians in June 2024, including Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock and Whoopi Goldberg.

An outspoken advocate for migrants, the pontiff welcomed Matteo Garrone and the cast members of his Oscar-nominated film Io Capitano, about two teenager who quit their home in Senegal and set off on a perilous journey across the Sahara in a bid to get to Euope.

One of the pope’s most important cinema relationships was with Martin Scorsese, which began when the director presented his epic historical drama Silence, about two Jesuit priests who travel to Edo-period Japan, at the Vatican.

They met in person in 2018 and then again in 2023 during the pope’s Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination conference, with their exchange on the fringes of the latter event inspiring Scorsese to start developing a film on the life of Jesus.

The Pope had also incorporated cinema and culture into the Catholic Church’s Jubilee Year 2025. Prior to being hospitalized on February 14, he had been due to visit Rome’s historic Cinecittà film studios on February 17 as part of the Jubilee Year celebrations, with his tour including Fellini’s favorite studio, Teatro 5.

While Pope Francis drew on cinema for inspiration, his life was also a source of inspiration for filmmakers, with documentaries capturing his papacy including Wim Wenders’ Pope Francis: A Man of his Word,  Evgeny Afineevksy’s Francesco and Gianfranco Rosi’s In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis.

Italian director Daniele Luchetti also made the 2015 fictionalized biopic Call Me Francis (Chiamatemi Francesco – Il Papa della gente), following the pope from his youth in Argentina to his election as pope, with Rodrigo de la Serna (The Motorcycle Diaries) playing him as younger man.

Most recently Pope Francis was played by Jonathan Pryce in Fernando Meirelles’s Netflix-backed 2019 bio-drama The Two Popes, revolving around his complex relationship with predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, played by Anthony Hopkins.

Netflix organized a screening of the film for the Vatican press corp and there were reports of a cardinal requesting a DVD for Pope Francis, but it was never made public as to whether the pontiff had seen the film or not, or indeed, if he did, enjoyed the comedy-drama.