MUSSOLINI IN COURT OVER ROMANIAN 'WHORE' FILM

MUSSOLINI IN COURT OVER ROMANIAN 'WHORE' FILM

(ANSA) - Rome, November 6 - A film allegedly slandering the granddaughter of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini will be the subject of a Rome court hearing on Monday in an attempt to block its release in late November.

Alessandro Mussolini, an MP with Premier Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party, has asked judges to keep "Francesca" from coming out unless the producers cut dialogue in which she is referred to as "a whore".

"The film must not be allowed to come out with those lines in it," said Mussolini, an MP with Premier Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom Party.

After the film premiered at the Venice film festival, Berlusconi said he would take up the matter with the Romanian premier Emil Bloc .

The film, 'Francesca', about a Romanian woman dreaming of moving to Italy to open a nursery, was to have been released in October.

The film's producers, Fandango, have refused to cut the film and said they intend to show Francesca ''in its entirety''.

The filmed remarks drew applause at the Venice Film Festival last week but the film was pulled from local cinemas following the complaint from Mussolini, who is chair of the Italian parliament's commission on children.

Romanian-born Italian director Bobby Paunescu has defended Francesca and recalled that the righ-twing politician once claimed Romanians had ''rape in their DNA''.

In November 2007, Mussolini's remarks about Romanians' allegedly inbuilt criminal tendencies triggered the collapse of the hard-right Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty grouping in the European Parliament, of which she was a member.

Romanians are Italy's largest immigrant community, numbering close to half a million according to Roman Catholic organisation Caritas, and some 340,000 according to government figures.