Rome Film Festival kicks off with lifetime achievement award to Tom Hanks

Rome Film Festival kicked off here on Thursday, honoring the Lifetime Achievement Award to American actor and director Tom Hanks.

An hour-long conversation moderated by Antonio Monda, the festival's artistic director, with the Oscar-winning star of "Philadelphia" and "Forrest Gump" was accompanied by a retrospective with video clips from some 15 of his movies.

At the end of the encounter, the award was conferred to Hanks by Italian film star and once beauty icon Claudia Cardinale.

The festival's opening screening was Barry Jenkins' drama "Moonlight", which brought on the screen the story of a young black man across three different phases of his life, as he struggles to define his identity while growing up in a tough neighborhood of Miami in the 1980s.

The complete line-up of this year's 11th edition of the annual Rome Film Festival, which is running at the musical park Auditorium from Oct. 13-23, will offer 44 movies and documentaries. There will be 24 world premieres among them.

The 2016 list of movies include Chinese 3D martial arts blockbuster "Sword Master" by Hong Kong director Derek Yee and Oscar-winner director Oliver Stone's "Snowden", which was based on the true story of American computer professional Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked crucial information of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance activities in 2013.

Other major screenings at the festival will comprise documentary "Into the Inferno" by German auteur Werner Herzog, Scottish director David Mackenzie's "Hell or High Water", a crime movie about robbers; and "7 Minutes" by Italian Michele Placido.

The official selection's screenings will close with Garth Davis' "Lion", which marked the feature authorial debut of the Australian director.

A series of offers will be taken during the festival, spreading beyond the boundaries of the Auditorium to several locations across Rome. Endi