I n June 1977, Roberto Rossellini died suddenly of a heart attack, home in Rome, less than a week after serving as jury president of the Cannes film festival. The director’s daughter Isabella – the fourth of his seven children – was then in her mid 20s. She remembers her mother, Ingrid Bergman, saying: “Dad left us quickly, just as quickly as he drove his Ferrari.”

The story of Roberto’s last two decades is told in Living Without a Script, a new archive-based documentary, which premieres this week in Rome. While the film serves as a reminder of its subject’s status as one of the greats of world cinema – the key figure in postwar Italian neorealism – it also shows his life beyond movies.

In the film, the director seems perpetually on the move: racing cars, studying biology and physics, a

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