My name is Orson Welles

From April 1st to October 5th, 2026, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema presents the prestigious exhibition “My Name Is Orson Welles.” Conceived by the Cinémathèque française and curated by its director Frédéric Bonnaud, the exhibition features more than 400 works—some never shown before—drawn from a wide range of public and private collections. Installed along the spectacular helical ramp of the Aula del Tempio inside the Mole Antonelliana, the exhibition retraces the life and career of the great filmmaker through photographs, archival documents, drawings, posters, audiovisual materials, and installations.

With Citizen Kane, he revolutionized the language of cinema; in The Lady from Shanghai, he created one of the most hypnotic sequences in film history; with F for Fake, he anticipated the mockumentary; and his Falstaff remains one of the finest adaptations of Shakespeare ever made. Director, actor, writer, illusionist, radio storyteller, and experimenter with visual and sound language, Welles made transformation a defining element of his poetics. Masks, disguises, and multiple identities run throughout his work: his own face becomes a space for continuous invention. The exhibition extends the creative drive of the American genius into an immersive and narrative journey, where cinema reveals itself as the art of illusion—not mere “fiction,” but a means of questioning the truth of images.