Article by: Beatrice Ceravolo
Translation by: Zoé Kerichard-Giorgi
The relationship between a documentarian and the subjects he films is fundamental for the success of a project: in the case of Marie Losier and Cassandro, personalities of the lucha libre and protagonists of this movie contending for the TFFDoc/International section, we witness a still strong friendship, born six years ago. Continua la lettura di “CASSANDRO, THE EXOTICO!” BY MARIE LOSIER
Article by: Cristian Viteritti
Translation by: Silvia Fontana
People respond in different ways to accidents, tragedies or griefs: those who directly experiences them are immerged in contrasting feelings of denial and anger, which gradually transform into acceptance. Whereas those who are not affected by pain try to support the former, showing compassion and trying to lighten the pain of those who suffer.
Article by: Cristina Danini
Translation by: Alice Marchi
As Tamàs (Gábor Reisz) is left by Anna, he doesn’t seem able to accept it. He wanders around Paris and comes back to his hometown Budapest, but he doesn’t want to talk to anybody about it. Life around him goes on, people find jobs, have children and talk about politics, but no one seems to understand him, not for real. His pain is just his, and no one else’s. Tamàs feels trapped in a mute movie where everyone passes him by, as if Anna had taken his life and his happy memories away from him. Tamàs is lost and, maybe, he really did lost himself, like it always happens when the end of a love-story hits us unexpectedly. Continua la lettura di “BAD POEMS” BY GÁBOR REISZ
Article by: Chiara Rosaia
Translation by: Luca Bassani
Deconstructing the concept of genre, emptying it of any previous framework, is Claire Denis’s well-established habit. This time, the French filmmaker decided to do so through science fiction, keeping in mind her usual trademark approach.
High Life tells the story of a group of convicts, lifers and death row inmates who choose to spend the rest of their lives in outer space: in exchange for a pardon, they need to take part in an overtly suicidal scientific experiment.
Article by: Gianluca Tana
Translation by: Daniele Gianolio
A deafening music that dazes the listener while at the same time brings him to a far and remote place, a man who claimed to be guided by the Daevas in the composition of his lyrics and who spent his entire life in a psychiatric hospital, heavily stigmatized by the music scene of his own time. In short, Giacinto Scelsi appears to be a character taken out from the pages of a story by H. P. Lovercraft. The documentary by Sebastiano d’Ayala Valva, a descendant of the composer, succeeds in overcoming this damnation memoriae by portraying a man aware of his own means, a precursor of his time who, as often happens to the great visionaries, is not acknowledged by his contemporaries and thus, disdained. Continua la lettura di “THE FIRST MOTION OF THE IMMOVABLE” BY SEBASTIANO D’AYALA VALVA
Article by: Tommaso Dufour
Translation by: Gianmarco Caniglia
One man from Caserta and the other from Rome: a few months ago, they did not know each other, but they have more than a few things in common. Marco D’Amore and Vinicio Marchioni are two talented actors with a solid experience. They have common theatrical backgrounds and frequent movie appearances, in addition to being well established among the public of the TV series made by the same director, Stefano Sollima, who “launched” the former with Romanzo Criminale (2008-2010) and the latter with Gomorra (2014 – ongoing). Today they are in Turin to present the first work of a young director, Simone Catania, a producer of documentary films who committed the two actors to a road movie that is touring Italy and Europe. Continua la lettura di “DRIVE ME HOME” BY SIMONE CATANIA
Article by: Fulvio Melito
Translation by: Cinzia Angelini
Sébastien Pilote presents a film that moves between lights and shadows, and socio-economic issues. The key to interpret the film and its characters is to be found precisely in the title, La disparition des lucioles: as communicated by the radio announcer, it seems that the fireflies have become extinct for unclear reasons but, certainly, because of mankind. They are small lights in the dark which transform the disquieting into something romantic, just like the protagonist, who lives in a city afflicted by the lack of work and closed in a generational immobility.
Continua la lettura di “LA DISPARITION DES LUCIOLES” BY SÉBASTIEN PILOTE
Article by: Alessia Durante
Translation by: Laura Facciolo
A red door. An elevator. We are inside. That’s how Anna Franceschini, the director of What Time Is Love, shows us into a weird and forsaken place. We are in Nuremberg, and it soon becomes clear that we are in a building where toys are tested with the purpose of getting the suitability for the European Community. The images follow each other as fixed shots: a dancing panda, a saxophonist reindeer, a plastic tractor, an elephant puppet. They are suffering many tortures, because even objects can be subjected to violence. Continua la lettura di ITALIANA.CORTI – PROGRAMME 2
Article by: Beatrice Ceravolo
Translation by: Priscilla Valente
Shireen Seno’s second feature-length film is not the common coming of age. The director claims that she had the idea for it in a dream, and the relationship between real and oneiric and between interior and exterior represents the focus of the film. The audience witnesses a fundamental moment in Yael’s life, a shy child who spends her days alone waiting for her mother to come back home or listening to messages on tapes sent by her absent father. The main character’s obsessions, confusion and solitude are reproduced with the awareness of someone who experienced them and did not forget them. Seno told in a Q&A that much of herself has been poured into the character of Yael, both into her personality and into her experience of familiar expatriation. The growing experience of the character in such a delicate moment of her life may echo something into every one of us.
Continua la lettura di “NERVOUS TRANSLATION” BY SHIREEN SENO
Article by: Fabrizio Spagna
Translation by: Emiliana Freiria
What clear shots this film has, and what natural colours, free from the aesthetical and lighting limitations that some works show. Temporada has a carioca soul, thanks to the vitality and the refinement that the viewer can feel and understand from the first images, while walking the boulevards on the hills of Contagem, a southern metropolis in Brasil, a huge and contradictory country.
Article by: Annagiulia Zoccarato
Translated by: Cecilia Facchin
Over the past few years, we have been used to see high-quality films coming from Scandinavia, and in particular Denmark. This is also proved by the fact that films such as The Hunt by Thomas Vinterberg and Land of Mine by Martin Zandvliet entered the top five Academy Awards nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. It is important to mention these films, because The Guilty (Den Skyldige in Danish), first work of young Danish director Gustav Möller, is both one of the nominees for the TFF36 contest and Denmark’s choice for the next Academy Awards.
It should be added, as pointed out by producer Lina Flint during the press conference, that “in Scandinavia there’s a generation of filmmakers who grew up with noir and wanted to offer something new to their audiences in order to promote this genre”. Möller belongs to this new wave of brilliantly written and staged noir, thanks to his brilliant and confident first work, that never ceases to impress.
Continua la lettura di “DEN SKYLDIGE/THE GUILTY” BY GUSTAV MÖLLER
Article by: Tommaso Dufour
Translation by: Giulia Quercia
Family, interpersonal relationships, forgiveness and violence are just a few of the topics that we can find in David Nawrath’s first feature film. The German director, with the producer Britta Knoller, has presented his film at the TFF36 contest. Walter (Rainer Bock) is the protagonist’s name whom, employed by an entrepreneur colluded with mob, clearing evicted residents’ houses for a living; stoically resisting to trouble and being indifferent to the youngest colleagues’ brutality and aggressiveness, he lives alone, speaks as less as he can and sleeps on the floor of his apartment. Even if it seems like the external events don’t affect him directly, his life is going to change.
Article by: Andrea Bagnasco
Translation by: Cristiana Manni
The botanist Julio Betancur and his assistant Cristian Castro walk through the Colombian jungle collecting and cataloguing numerous plant species.
Continua la lettura di “HOMO BOTANICUS” BY GUILLERMO QUINTERO
Article by: Lorenzo Radin
Translation by: Letizia Bosello
It’s funny how our concept of “self-realisation” may change. Leaving the suburbs of Chicago, learning a new sport in the streets, becoming the Horizon League’s “player of the year” for two years in a row, being a step away from the NBA and being transferred to one of the major Italian professional teams means being successful. However, someone in the audience disagrees: if a basketball player doesn’t join the NBA, he is a loser.
Article by: Gianluca Tana
Translation by: Alice Marchi
Director Stanley Kwan doesn’t need introduction. First Night Nerves represents for the director, who grew up during the Second New Wave of the Hong Kong cinema, a chance to come back home after a long absence. Even if many sequences have been filmed in a sound stage, the city plays a marginal yet fundamental role. The director sets the scene of the fictitious play Two Sisters in the Hong Kong city hall, for which a demolition proposal has been recently put forward. The director’s choice is a declaration of love for this building, where he spent a lot of time directing plays or taking part in film festivals. Continua la lettura di “FIRST NIGHT NERVES” BY STANLEY KWAN
Article by: Alessia Durante
Translation by: Maria Elisa Catalano
Probably, only Valerio Mastandrea could title Ride (which means ‘to laugh’ in Italian) a film about pain and mourning: a title which becomes caustic and, as he declared during the press conference, a little paradoxical too. Especially considering that the protagonist Carolina laughs very little in those ninety minutes of darkness and, if not for what the other characters say to her (and to us), we would not see her laughing at all.
Article by: Chiara Gioffrè
Translation by: Massimo Campostrini
Excess.
Absence.
These two words tormented me as I tried to rearrange my impressions on Mandy, a film that is atypical but coherent with the (short) filmography of its director.
Article by: Laura Barbella
Translation by: Melania Petricola
Bodybuilder, taxi driver, thief and art dealer: Walid called The Beast is the first person that the director Marco Proserpio met after crossing the checkpoint from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Along the way the huge taxi driver told him about how he carried off four tons of cement from the artwork Donkey with the Soldier by Banksy and how he put it up for auction on eBay for 100.000$.
Continua la lettura di “THE MAN WHO STOLE BANKSY” BY MARCO PROSERPIO
Article by: Cristina Danini
Translation by: Silvia Fontana
Howie (Brendan Meyer) is sixteen years old and he’s at mercy of his life. His parents want to divorce, or so it seems, and at school a classmate of his brother shows interest in him, but he only has eyes for the beautiful girl he takes the bus with. They have never talked to each other, she is older and he is very clumsy, but when their eyes meet, they both smile. Continua la lettura di “ALL THESE SMALL MOMENTS” BY MELISSA B. MILLER
Article by: Maria Cagnazzo
Translation by: Giulia Maiorana
The description of someone’s life through words and musical notes. This is Blaze, a film by Ethan Hawke, presented in the Festa Mobile section at the 36th Torino Film Festival. It is the story of the country singer Blaze Foley, who died at the age of 40 because of his extreme dissoluteness, or for his audacity.
The narration is a constant coming and going between past and present, as a matter of fact it unravels in three different time-frames: Blaze’s life with his muse before success; the singer after Sibyl; friends who talk about him on the radio after his death.
