The Egyptian Museum lands in cinema with an event film. Featuring the extraordinary participation of Jeremy Irons

One year after the bicentennial celebration of its founding, the Egyptian Museum of Turin comes to the cinema for the first time with the event film Men and Gods. The Wonders of the Egyptian Museum, which premiered at the 41st Turin Film Festival and will be released in theaters next January. Produced by 3D Produzioni, Nexo Digital and Sky in collaboration with the Egyptian Museum and directed by Michele Mally, who signs the subject with Matteo Moneta, author of the screenplay, the film features the extraordinary participation of Oscar winner Jeremy Irons, who takes viewers on a journey to discover the treasures ofAncient Egypt.

The Egyptian Museum in Turin holds 40,000 artifacts, 12,000 of which are displayed on four floors of the museum. Sphinxes, colossal statues, tiny amulets and sarcophagi tell the story of nearly 4,000 years of ancient history. Among the most famous exhibits are the Papyrus of Kings, the only list that has come down to us that reconstructs the succession of pharaohs, handwritten on papyrus, or the Papyrus of Mines, one of the oldest known maps. And again, sculptures such as the statue of the priest Anen, that of Ramesses II, and that of Isis of Coptic, as well as the rich grave goods of Kha, superintendent of the construction of the pharaohs’ tombs who, together with his wife Merit, will be among the protagonists throughout the narrative.

Finds, scientific studies, and the behind-the-scenes of the museum are chorally narrated not only by Museum President Evelina Christillin and Director Christian Greco, but also by some of the museum’s curators such as Cédric Gobeil, Beppe Moiso, Susanne Toepfer, Paolo Del Vesco, Federico Poole, Johannes Auenmüller, Enrico Ferraris, Alessia Fassone, and Tommaso Montonati, by restorers Cinzia Oliva, Roberta Genta, and Paola Buscaglia of the Conservation and Restoration Center of La Venaria Reale, by anthropologist Pieter Ter Keurs, by Louvre Egyptian Department Director Vincent Rondot, by Head of the Egypt and Sudan Department of the British Museum Daniel Antoine, British Museum curators Ilona Regulski and Marcel Maree, Director of the Agyptisches und Papyrussammlung in Berlin Friederike Seyfried, Director General Egyptian Museum in Cairo Sabah Abdel Razik Saddik, and Ceo of Ima Solutions Sarl Benjamin Moreno.

From the Louvre in Paris to the British Museum in London to the Ägyptisches Museum in Berlin-these are just a few of the major world museum institutions from which the members of the museum’s scientific committee, which boasts more than ninety scientific collaborations with international museums, universities and research centers, hail.

The collections housed in Turin include more than 40,000 artifacts that have an antiquarian nature, as they are linked to the collecting and collecting criteria of Bernardino Drovetti, a Piedmontese diplomat in the service of the French government who sold the first nucleus of the museum’s collections to Charles Felix of Savoy for 400,000 liras at the time, and an archaeological nature linked to archaeological excavation campaigns promoted by Ernesto Schiaparelli and Giulio Farina in Egypt in the early 20th century.

Why was it precisely in Turin, in 1824, that it was decided to open a museum that had no equal in the world, dedicated to a civilization that was still being unveiled? Who was the first to see the outline of the pyramids in the Alps? To discover the origins of the Egyptian Museum, the film will travel up the course of the Nile in the footsteps of its great explorers and archaeologists of the past-Donati, Drovetti, Schiapparelli. It will visit the places from which the main finds in the Turin collections came, from Giza to Thebes to the ancient village of Deir el-Medina, inhabited by the scribes and artisans of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and Queens. And you will travel back in time, when the rulers of Piedmont, the Savoy family, to give prestige to their capital city rewrote the myth of Turin’s Egyptian origins, superimposing the bull, symbol of the city, with the god Apis, who had the likeness of a bull and was worshipped in ancient Egypt. Instead, through the sarcophagi and grave goods from the tomb of Kha and Merit, the architect Kha’s journey to the Underworld will be recounted, from the moment of mummification to the funeral, to the judgment before Osiris and life in the Afterlife, following the pages of the Book of the Dead.

The original soundtrack is composed and orchestrated by pianist and composer Remo Anzovino and performed by the author with the Accademia Naonis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Valter Sivilotti: to be released on Nexo Digital label and Believe distribution in 2024.

Great Art at the Movies is an original and exclusive project of Nexo Digital. For 2024, La Grande Arte al Cinema is distributed exclusively in Italy by Nexo Digital with media partners Radio Capital, Sky Arte, MYmovies.it and in collaboration with Abbonamento Musei.

The Egyptian Museum lands in cinema with an event film. Featuring the extraordinary participation of Jeremy Irons

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