The Roma Film Music Festival 2025 celebrated the irreplaceable human soul in film music, contrasting creative intelligence with artificial intelligence. From April 6 to 12, 2025, in the heart of Rome, the fourth edition of the Roma Film Music Festival took place—an event dedicated to celebrating film music through live concerts, special screenings, and talks with key figures from the industry. Among the symbolic venues of the festival, the legendary Forum Studios—founded in 1970 by masters such as Ennio Morricone, Armando Trovajoli, and Piero Piccioni—hosted several key events, including the “Film Music Talks”, a series of conversations with composers, directors, and music critics.
One of the most meaningful events was the special screening of the documentary Il était une fois Michel Legrand (2024) by David Hertzog Dessites, presented in its Italian premiere on April 12 at the Forum Studios. The film, previously selected in the Cannes Classics section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, offers an intimate portrait of the last two years in the life of the celebrated French composer Michel Legrand, known for the scores of films such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Thomas Crown Affair.
Before the screening, an exclusive backstage of the film En Mai Fais Ce Qu’il Te Plaît by Ennio Morricone was shown. During the event, director Dessites shared a personal anecdote: while working as a street cleaner in Cannes—as the film festival lit up the Croisette—he met the composer and told him: «If I exist, it’s also thanks to you and your music. My parents had the soundtrack of The Thomas Crown Affair on CD—maybe that music played a part in bringing me into the world.» This statement amused Legrand and sparked the idea for the documentary project.
Dessites described his film as: «A film about AI. But not the kind we talk about today: here, AI stands for Artistic Intelligence.» A bold statement that encourages reflection on the irreplaceable value of human creativity. As the director said: «We’re not interested in how a soundtrack is made, but in what it makes us feel. What is human cannot be replaced.»
At a time when artificial intelligence dominates the cultural and industrial debate, the Roma Film Music Festival turned the spotlight on the other kind of AI—the one that comes from the soul. Dessites emphasized: «Artworks cannot come from technology. They come from something we might never understand—something divine. What we don’t grasp with reason, we understand with the heart.»
While artificial intelligence promises soundtracks generated by algorithms, the Roma Film Music Festival offers a crucial vision of cinema and art—one that always needs humanity in order to move us.
