Hermitage. The Power of Art

The documentary is about the Hermitage History Museum - Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg (Russia), the second largest museum in the world. The director of this documentary is Michele Mally ('Klimt and Schiele, Eros and Psyche'). Journalist Santiago Alverú has written a review for the medium Cinemania in which he praises the film: "Asking a documentary about a museum to transmit all these sensations seems risky, but this one borders on achieving it. With Hermitage Museum: the power of art, Michele Mally, director specialized in portraying the lives of painters and art galleries, performs a fascinating evasion exercise. It offers the viewer a journey not only through the current affairs of one of the largest museums in the world and its collection of more than three million pieces. It also manages, with good rhythm and rigorous documentation, to explain its history, as conflicting as that of Saint Petersburg, in which tsars, wars, revolutions and looting enter. Mally also relies on Toni Servillo, his narrator, eminent Italian actor with the necessary shamelessness to talk about past times without being dandy or syrupy, but with enough fragility to thrill when describing the suicide of a poet. This documentary is an intelligent, educational and as free story as we hope to be soon, not to be left with the desire to visit each room of the Hermitage".