Gael Garcia Bernal is taking a special lead role in Italy…

The 44-year-old Mexican actor and producer will preside over the jury of the upcoming Rome Film Festival.

Garcia Bernal, who currently stars in the Amazon Prime film Cassandro, will be judging entries and bestowing prizes in the rebooted fest’s main section, which is now known as Progressive Cinema.

Films competing for Rome prizes include Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s Un Amor, about a young woman socially and sexually exploited by a rural patriarchy; Iranian director Farhad Delaram’s Achilles, in which a former filmmaker turned medic decides to help a female political prisoner escape from a psych ward; and French director Mehdi Fikri’s After The Fire, which turns on a French woman of North African descent who seeks justice after her younger brother dies suspiciously after being stopped by the police.

The Eternal City event’s upcoming 18th edition – which will run October 18-29 – will be the second since the appointment of RAI Cinema executive Paola Malanga as the fest’s artistic director and Gian Luca Farinelli, who heads the Bologna film archives, as president.

They have reshaped the Rome fest – which over the years has had it’s ups and downs – as a competitive event that has at its core a mix of mostly auteur titles, many with political themes, plus a panoply of more crowd pleasing films of different types screening out-of-competition.