The last time Francis Ford Coppola disappeared from the public eye some years ago, he re-emerged with Apocalypse Now.

Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack in the jungle, a typhoon destroyed the film set, he himself almost lost his life, but he went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, changing the way we thought about Vietnam and about film-making.

Now, after 10 years of silence since Rain Man, he is undoubtedly the most awaited filmmaker in the coming season.

Francis Ford Coppola will return to the screen with Youth Without Youth, which will have its world premiere at the Film Festival of Rome.

Youth Without Youth is taken from a novel by writer and historian of religion Mircea Eliade. It tells the story, set in Romania between the Second World War and the 1960s, of an elderly professor, a student of languages and obsessed by his search for the world’s proto-language, who is hit by a bolt of lightning and begins to grow younger.

The story continues in India, Malta, Switzerland, between the SS seeking the protagonist, who is convinced he has invented a miraculous medicine, and love for a mysterious woman, who may be a reincarnation of a priestess of the 7th century.