Patriarchy, alpine villages meet in film festival
Stories of love, friendship, art and emancipation will be on display at this year’s Cinema Italiano Festival.
The touring festival will hit 18 towns and cities across New Zealand from the end of April.
Artistic director Paolo Rotondo said the 24 Italian films in the festival were operating on a world scale.
“They are doing very well internationally, but they are very, very Italian,” he said.
A few of the movies in the festival were from auteur Nanni Moretti, he said.
“This year he released his new film called A Brighter Tomorrow (Il sole dell’avvenire), which felt like a return to some of the films that made Nanni Moretti so famous back in the ’90s.
“It felt like his funny bone, his sense of humour, was back,” Rotondo said.
He said some of the distinctive and original films by Moretti had become classics, such as Dear Diary (Caro Diario), which will open the festival on April 29.
The Eight Mountains (Le otto montagne), a movie about male friendship based on an Italian book directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, also features in this year’s programme.
Rotondo said the Belgian duo, who directed Italian actors in the Western Alps and Himalaya, likely brought a different, better perspective than if an Italian director had made the same movie.
The Eight Mountains won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022.
It tells the story of two friends who meet in an alpine village and grow up sharing a love of mountaineering.
Rotondo said the debut of Paola Cortellesi as director in There’s Still Tomorrow (C’è ancora domani) was a challenging but at the same time uplifting and funny movie.
He said the film, which was shot in black and white, and based in 1946 Rome, talked about the emancipation of women, and touched on topics such as domestic violence and the patriarchy.
“She doesn’t care about all the rules of film-making ... she breaks all the rules with a lightness and a carefree way.
“She doesn’t care at all what you are supposed to do in films and what you are not supposed to,” Rotondo said.
The festival also has a series of documentaries and films that put art and artists in the foreground, such as the documentary on fashion stylist Gianni Versace. “If you think about it, the style that Gianni Versace had, even though it’s fashion and contemporary, it’s drawing on Italian traditions that are very ancient and very old, like the Baroque style,” Rotondo said.
Festival schedule Blenheim: Event Cinemas, August 8-18 Nelson: State Cinema, September 5-22 Christchurch: Lumiere Cinema, September 4-29