Archivi categoria: Film (English)

English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“CLEANERS” By GLENN BARIT

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Article by Fabio Bertolotto

Translated by Nadia Tordera

The “cleaners” to which the title refers are a group of eight students from a strict Catholic school in the Philippines. They are defined in this way because they are the protagonists of four stories in which they are forced to respect obtuse educational rules that require them to be clean and correct at all costs. Cleaners also describes the pressures that young people experience from a world that is dirty and superficial.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“REGINA” BY ALESSANDRO GRANDE

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Article by Marco Ghironi

Translated by Francesca Cozzitorto

Regina, the only Italian film in competition at the Turin Film Festival 2020, is Alessandro Grande’s first feature film.

The director’s long experience with the short film form explains the mastery of the story-telling in a more extended time, without ever losing the viewer’s attention. A whirlwind of music, glances, silences and lies converge in a real coming-of-age story. The protagonists are the young Regina (Ginevra Francesconi) and her father Luigi (Francesco Montanari), who are committed to helping his daughter fulfill the dream of becoming a singer in every possible way. He had the same dream but he had to give up on it after his wife passed away. However, everything changes when an unforeseen event disrupts their lives.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“AL LARGO” BY ANNA MARZIANO

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Article by Francesco Dubini

Translated by Giulia Neirone

“A disorienting and extraordinary experience” that’s how Anna Marziano defines Al largo, her metamorphic and complex film, which combines philosophic research and cinematographic knowledge. The documentary wants to analyze the pain related to an illness, in a timeless context which connects the director’s personal experience and Nietzsche and Winnicott’s works.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“A RIFLE AND A BAG” BY CRISTINA HANES, ISABELLA RINALDI, ARYA ROTHE

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Article by Alessandro Pomati

Translated by Nadia Tordera

Since the 1960s in the Indian jungle the militant Maoist group of Naxalites has operated in charge of protection (even violent) of the tribal minorities of the sub-continent. Since their foundation these armed groups have played the role of “public enemy nr.1”  for the country’s internal security.

However for the rebels who had surrendered, total amnesty and protection from retaliation by former militant comrades, were always guaranteed within well-protected communities. And A Rifle and a Bag, the first work of the collective “NoCut Film” formed by Cristina Haneş, Isabella Rinaldi and Arya Rothe, is about one of these realities of “refugees”.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“FRIED BARRY” By RYAN KRUGER

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Article by Noemi Castelvetro

Translated by Paola Macchiarella

Specialized film critics were caught rather off guard, because cinema has experienced a change when it comes to the ways it is exploited. On the other hand, new perspectives emerged in terms of film discourse and instruments to understand it. It is especially evidentin films like this one, in which the stated intent is to tell a certain audience to beat it. That being said, it is very difficult to examine Fried Barry without distorting it, but it is also unnecessary to dissect it in order to extract an additional critical consideration, which would be “too much of a good thing”.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“EYIMOFE” By ARIE E CHUKO ESIRI

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Article by Angelo Elia

Translated by Carmen Tucci

Eyimofe (This is my desire), first feature film by Arie and Chuko Esiri  (two brothers) is, like we can guess from the title, a movie about desire. The two protagonists, Mofe and Rosa, want to leave Nigeria and go abroad: they won’t succeed and they will learn at a high price not to confuse their own desire with their own satisfaction.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“BOTOX ” BY KAVEH MAZAHERI

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Article by Andrea Bruno

Translated by Aurora Sciarrone

“It was a dark and stormy night”, as Snoopy would have wrote. That is how Botox begins, in a dark and stormy night, while on a TV screen another classic cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote, performs one of his usual tumbles, out of which he will be comically deformed but still unharmed. Akram (Susan Parvar) is completely taken by the scene. She is affected by autism, and she is stuck in a world made of repetitive actions and a vaguely childish attitude, and perhaps she believes that the same laws of physics that dominate the cartoon world apply to the real one, too. It so happens that she does not hesitate to push her brother Emad (SoroushSaeidi, also being the film’s producer) off the roof, who is guilty of having made fun of her one too many times.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“IL BUCO IN TESTA” BY ANTONIO CAPUANO

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Article by Marco Ghironi

Translated by Nadia Tordera

Born and raised in the suburbs of Naples, Maria (Teresa Saponangelo) is orphaned of her father even before coming into the world. She lost him because of a gunshot by the brigadier Guido Mandelli (Tommaso Ragno), who will see the young woman knocking on his door in search of answers, once he has served his sentence in prison. With Il buco in testa, presented out of competition at the Torino Film Festival, Antonio Capuano dedicates a new chapter to his Naples, the unaware theater of adrift lives.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“FILM” By FABRIZIO BELLOMO

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Article by Arianna Vietina

Translated by Nadia Tordera

Is one hour enough to re-discuss the complex issues of work and technology in the contemporary world? Obviously the answer is no, but Fabrizio Bellomo is capable of taking advantage of this time, even if short, to propose a huge amount of suggestions and questions, just as he normally does with his peculiar art works. It is an experimental film, in which an exorbitant number of images taken directly from real life is represented on the screen: from Facebook scrolls to Power Point presentations to municipal council recordings and television broadcasts. But Film proposes a clear way through the contradictions of progress, leaving us the questions: has technology made us less slaves than work? Does it allow us to be more masters of our tools? Or will we continue to live forever subject to objects and to the power they have to give us sustenance and dignity? What does dignity mean for a man/worker?

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“MY AMERICA” BY BARBARA CUPISTI

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Article by Roberto Guida

Translated by Nadia Tordera

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” A famous preamble, thought to be immortal even if we are immediately warned that in reality, in 2020, many still try to understand it.

However there is a light in Barbara Cupisti’s documentary work My America, feeble but alive.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“CALIBRO 9” BY TONI D’ANGELO

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Article by Cristina Danini

Translated by Simona Sucato

Milan, Frankfurt, Moscow, Antwerp, a calabrian city. Places in the movie marked by red lettering, squares on the chessboard of a game with no holds barred. Playing for life Fernando Piazza (Marco Bocci), that the mother has not been able to turn away from his father’s underworld; on the other side of the table, the ‘ndrangheta. To help him, in a game more difficult than he could imagine, there is only Maia (Ksenia Rappoport), the girl he once loved, now a woman belonging to Corapi’s clan.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“MÃES DO DERICK” (MOTHERS OF DERICK) BY DÊ KELM

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Article by Valentina Velardi

Translated by Francesca Cozzitorto

Presented in the International section of the festival, the film is about the life of a non-monogamous and unconventional family made up of a nine-year-old boy, Derick, Tammy’s biological son, and his other three mothers who raised him: Bruna, Shiva and Ana.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“KUFID” BY ELIA MOUTAMID

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Article by Carola Capello

Translated by Simona Sucato

“As a child, my parents taught me to say Inch’Allah (God willing) when I plan to do something. Here, Kufid is this: planning something unplanned. An oxymoron”. As Elia Moutamid states – Moroccan director, special mention as best new director at 2018 Nastri d’Argento –, whose first film Talien won in 2017 the Gran Premio della Giuria at Torino Film Festival.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“CASA DE ANTIGUIDADES” BY JOÃO PAULO MIRANDA MARIA

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Article by Fabio Bertolotto

Translated by Nadia Tordera

Even before the images, there is a white light that suggests the coordinates for viewing the film. A light that invades the screen and appears as an eccentric substitute for black, on which the opening credits flow in reverse, from the top to the bottom, suggesting a backward path. This inverse motion is the spirit that moves Casa de antiguidades, the film of the Brazilian director João Paulo Miranda Maria that first looks at the past to talk about the present.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“LUCKY” BY NATASHA KERMANI – “REGRET” BY SANTIAGO MENGHINI

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Article by Luca Giardino

Translated by Valeria Collavini

“Go it alone”: that’s the title that young writer May Ryer (Bea Grant) chooses for her latest self-help handbook. Although her books don’t sell well and business is slow, May has far worse problems to deal with. A creepy, masked man breaks every night into the house where the writer lives with her husband, haunting her and pushing her to the edge. However, nobody seems to take this situation seriously – neither her condescending, insensitive husband nor the police, leaving May alone to her fate.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“A MACHINE TO LIVE IN” BY YONI GOLDSTEIN and MEREDITH ZIELKE

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Article by Angelo Elia

Translated by Nadia Tordera

«Just for a moment, let’s dream together». This is the beginning of A Machine To Live In, directed by Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke and shown at the Torino Film Festival “ TFFDOC/Paesaggio” section. The dream in which the film wants us to live is about Brasilia, the Brazilian capital built on a bare plain in a thousand days. Desired by the President Kubitschek, planned and designed by the architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, it was introduced as a utopia that has become reality at its inauguration in 1960. Brasilia is a shimmering example of modernist architecture: It is a city with many shapes, many triangles, lots of white, lots of mirrors and «completely shadowless». Probably this is the reason why the incidence of ultraviolet rays causes many cases of visual impairment. But if we want to live in a dream, we have to see less.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“MOVING ON” BY YOON DAN-BI

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Article by Alessandro Pomati

Translated by Paola Macchiarella

“I long that far away place, where my loved ones come from”: these song lyrics open “Moving on”, first Yoon Dan-bi work, winner of four awards at the Busan International Short Film Festival. These lyrics seem to suggest a return to the roots for the director, back to her starting point.

And this is also what happens to the main characters of Yoon’s film, a brother and a sister who leave the house of their divorced father, a humble street vendor selling knockoff designer shoes. The children move to their grandfather’s, a suffering old man who is often hospitalized.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“WILDFIRE” BY CATHY BRADY

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Article by Valentina Velardi

Translated by Aurora Sciarrone

Intimist and political at the same time, the director Brady’s debut film shows the transgenerational psychological impact of the Northern Irish conflict through the story of two sisters.

Filmed on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, it begins when Kelly (Nika McGuigan), missing after her mother’s death, suddenly comes back to the little town where she ran away from, bursting into her sister Lauren’s life (Nora-Jane Noone).

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“MICKEY ON THE ROAD” BY MIAN MIAN LU

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Article by Noemi Castelvetro

Translated by Simona Sucato

Renegotiating gender rules costs an overseas trip, the Mickey of the title, in a post-adolescence coming of age parable that establishes once and for all, the transition to adulthood. On the road is also the festive path of Mian Mian Lu’s debut feature film: from Taipei, to Vancouver and finally in competition for the 38th edition of Torino Film Festival.

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English version, Film, Film (English), Report (English), TFF 38 - 2020, Torino Film Festival

“GUNDA” by VICTOR KOSSAKOVSKY

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Article by Carola Capello

Translated by Giulia Neirone

After Aquarela – cautionary film about water strength and beauty premiered in 2018 Venice Film Festival and included in the 2019 documentary nomination of the Academy Awards – Gunda is another simple, although not granted, food for thought by the Russian director Victor Kossakovsky. Set in a farm where we can only see a wooden house surrounded by nature, the main character is a group of animals in their everyday life.

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