Where patriarchy, alpine villages and fashion meet

Stories of love, friendship, art and emancipation are coming to the south in 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 would open the festival on April 29.

Other films to feature were the Eight Mountains (Le otto montagne), a movie about two men who grew up sharing a love of mountaineering, based on an Italian book directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch.

It won the jury prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2022.

There was also the debut of Paola Cortellesi as director in There’s Still Tomorrow (C’è ancora domani), a challenging but funny film shot in 1946 Rome, looking at the emancipation of women and domestic violence.

The festival would screen in Wānaka at Ruby’s Cinema & Bar from September 18 to 29, and in Arrowtown at Dorothy Browns, September 30 to October 7.