Translated by: Benedetta Francesca De Rossi
Article by: Giuseppe Catalano
“There’s nowhere to run”
A group of extremely dangerous Korean criminals leave the port of Manila on a hyper-secured cargo ship to return home, where they will finally be tried for their crimes. What could possibly go wrong?
read moreArticle by: Luca Giardino
Translated by: Benedetta Francesca De Rossi
The 40th edition of the TFF is covered in stars and stripes in the new retrospective on western cinema: the festival’s director – Steve Della Casa is a great fan of the genre – could only pay homage to some films of this fundamental strand in American production from 1938 to 1960.
Leggi tutto: “HIGH NOON: RETROSPECTIVE ON B-WESTERNS”The films in question, however, have nothing to do with the great auteurs of the Hollywood western, in this case replaced by skilled tradesmen such as Joseph H. Lewis and Alfred “Al” Green, cornerstones of the industry and prolific creators of b-movies. Thematically too, there was a desire to find a common thread linking the various titles in the section: extravagance and uniqueness are the two terms that guided a careful selection of the most unknown and forgotten films of American cinema par excellence.
But what is western cinema without its heroes? Sometimes ‘knights without blemish and without fear’, other times men torn apart by a dark past. In High Noon, the heroes are nothing more than anomalous characters at the mercy of the narrative, which transports them – willingly or unwillingly – to new and painful frontiers: this is the case of Henry Carson (Van Johnson) in R. Rowland’s rural The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947) where we are presented not with a restless cowboy, but with a romantic and mysterious vagabond who settles in the house of Southerner Gill MacBean (Thomas Mitchell), the father-master of the beautiful Lissy (Janet Leigh).
The same could be said for Four Faces West (1948) directed by Al Green where we find Joel McCrea as Ross McEwan, a bandit with a heart of gold on the run from the infamous – but more harmless than his classic portrayal – sheriff Pat Garrett. Not a single shot is fired throughout the film: this is unnecessary, since our outlaw is actually a good and generous man who gives the money he stole to his financially struggling father and helps a needy Mexican family afflicted with diphtheria.
The absence of duels in Green’s film is compensated for by J. H. Lewis’ Terror in a Texas Town (1958), in which guns are loaded and fired, but when firearms are not enough, harpoons and forges worthy of a Melville novel appear in the anomalous final confrontation between the one-armed gunman Johnny Crale (Nedrick Young) and the vengeful George Hansen (Sterling Hayden).
The section dedicated to B-westerns reserved some curious rediscoveries and courageous revivals such as S. Newfield’s The Terror of Tiny Town (1938), a musical played entirely by dwarf actors, but also more sober films in Technicolor such as R. Enright’s Coroner Creek (1948) and L. Selander’s Shotgun (1955). In short, High Noon took spectators on an atypical journey through the festival trails, offering genre lovers unmissable appointments with the theatre and the most unusual stories of the American frontier.
Article by Nicolò Pilon
Translated by Maria Bellantoni
The 22nd edition of the Glocal Film Festival, organised by the Associazione Piemonte Movie, will take place from the 10th to the 14th March 2023. The aim of this event is the promotion and diffusion of cinema made in Piedmont, but not only: the festival wants to promote local and global exchanges and contaminations, make room to Piedmontese artists with a global vision.
read allArticle by: Irma Benedetto
Translator: Laura Todeschini
“Nothing can go back / to when the sea was calm” plays Conchiglie, the second song by Andrea Laszlo de Simone to take centre stage in a film at the 40 th Turin Film Festival, after Immensità heard in Bertrand Bonello’s Coma. The life of the young high school student Lucas is shaken by the sudden death of his father (played by Honoré himself), which unleashes a shockwave capable of straining the family’s resilience and bringing to the surface long-suppressed grey areas.
read allTranslated by: Benedetta Francesca De Rossi
Article by: Marco di Pasquale
What Ery Claver tries to tell metaphorically with Our Lady of The Chinese Shop is the exploitation of Angola. After Portuguese colonialism, the country became the target of the economic interests of China, which has recently invested in several African countries to profit from the enormous mineral and natural resources.
Read more: “OUR LADY OF THE CHINESE SHOP” BY ERY CLAVERIn a poor neighbourhood of Luanda, during the Covid-19 pandemic, hopes and fears are projected in plastic icons of Our Lady sold in a small Chinese shop. The owner, Zhang Wei (Meili Li), punctuates the timing of the story and his voice, in a mysterious and poetic tone, offers the viewer a further interpretation of what is shown by the camera. He, the omniscient narrator, sees and knows everything about the stories that intertwine in the film: Domingas (Cláudia Púcuta), consumed by grief at the loss of her daughter, and Zoyo (Willi Ribeiro) in search of a missing friend. Their repressed resentment is reflected in the restless movements of the camera, which does not stop even in the most static scenes. The two characters metaphorically represent the country’s feelings of revenge against its rulers. If the old Portuguese colonisation is represented by the strong presence and importance of the Catholic religion in the community, Chinese economic dominance is shown through the bright neon signs of Xiaomi, a smartphone company.
The society represented by Ery Claver seems desperate for guidance. Religion has nothing to offer but plastic figures, while politics and its decadence are represented by a surreal and parodistic meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, staged in a city arena that was never completed and is now in ruins. The only way, the director suggests, is that of rebellion. Zoyo, in an act of desperation, destroys the Chinese shop and its icons, while Domingas finds her emancipation in revenge on her abusive husband responsible for the death of her daughter. The discourse brought forward by Ery Claver, through allegories and shots with a strong symbolic charge, takes on a universal character of protest against the new and silent forms of exploitation and colonialism perpetrated in poor countries throughout the world.
Article by: Emidio Sciamanna
Translated by: Maria Bellantoni
Memories of a distant past that gradually fades in time often remain linked to an ideal world reworked by our minds to preserve emotions, sensations, fleeting instants of our existence in which we have, even for an instant, savoured flashes of true happiness. Manodopera recounts the world evoked by the sweet and nostalgic words of a grandmother, restoring the memory of a bygone era, made up of sacrifices and carefreeness, suffering and love.
The location, recreated in stop-motion, is a small mountain village at the foot of Monviso. It is called Borgata Ughettera and recalls the director Alain Ughetto’s Piedmontese origins. The film comes to life through the words of Cesira, his grandmother, who thinks back to her youth towards the end of the 19th century. Starting from some fundamental events, she thus gives rise to a reality suspended in time that is emphasised by the fragile malleability of the plasticine with which the characters are made of.
Between cardboard houses and bizarre broccoli trees, the objects somehow represent an indispensable aspect of the story; tangible elements whose purpose is to bring the sweetness of a memory closer to the purity of nature. The simplicity of the poor peasant world, the meeting with her future husband Luigi, the difficult periods of war and the need to emigrate to France in order to work and survive: these are the episodes that characterise Cesira’s past and that she describes to her nephew, in a surreal and poetic exchange between the animated universe and the real presence of the director on stage.
What Ughetto wanted to tell is not only the story of his origins, but also the story of all immigrants, wherever they come from in the world. A story of hard work, of adaptation, of gazes that lacerate the soul and leave irremediable wounds. This is why certain stereotypes in the film take on a different meaning, as if they were the images perceived by those who feel invaded and – not knowing other cultures and not understanding the languages spoken by migrants – judge those from other countries as inferior. As the original title makes clear: “forbidden to dogs and Italians”, a dramatic situation that our families have had to live with in the past and that is being played out again today, this time through the eyes of the viewer.
Article by: Emidio Sciamanna
Translated by: Noemi Zoppellaro
According to Mesopotamian mythology, the female demon Lamashtu was a devilish creature bringer of nightmares and diseases, who haunted unborn children by brutally ripping them out of their mother’s womb to feed on their blood. Venus, the latest feature by Jaume Balagueró, begins with a terrifying apocalyptic premonition: the reincarnation of the demonic figure is imminent and her coming will bring chaos and pain throughout the planet.
At the centre of the narrative is young Lucía, a dancer in an infamous nightclub run by a group of comically stereotyped criminals. One night, after stealing a big drug shipment from the gangsters, she miraculously manages to find shelter at her sister Rocío’s house, located in a building called Venus, in the decaying outskirts of Madrid. Venus – hence the title of the film – is a gloomy and mysterious place, home to dark presences that have been haunting the unfortunate residents for decades.
Loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s short story The Dreams in the Witch House, skilfully reworked by the Spanish director into a “horror story” with strong authorial connotations, Venus recalls in its structure the previous film, Muse, in which the paranormal subtly hovers against the background of an ordinary criminal investigation. Also in this case, the film crawls sinuously through the meanders of genre cinema, combining effectively sci-fi horror with gangster film, without ever becoming trivial or repetitive. Moreover, the caricatural element is intentionally emphasised, continuing the specific project on the grotesque that characterises the entire work of Balagueró.
This is definitely not the Spanish director’s masterpiece, however his ability to direct female figures is confirmed as excellent. In Venus, clearly inspired by Dario Argento’s characters, Lucía moves in a suffocating atmosphere, halfway between the nightmares caused by the demon and the oppressive reality of the daily life that the young woman must constantly face. For her, the building takes on a clear, although paradoxical, ambivalence: it is a prison that holds back her desire to dance, restricting her in a forced immobility caused by fear; but it is also a safe haven, a solid shelter to escape the demons that await her outside, the true nightmare of real life.
Translated by: Benedetta Francesca De Rossi
Article by: Alessandro Pomati
Albania, 1985. After 40 years of indiscriminate exercise of power, the dictator Enver Hoxa died, creating a still unbridgeable void in Albanian politics. Under his leadership, the country experienced some of the darkest pages of its history, and the repression was followed by a diaspora of anything but modest dimensions, with Italy as one of its points of reference in many cases. Redi Hasa, a professional cellist who has been active in Italy for many years, was one of the protagonists of that diaspora and, through his speeches, the consequences of those forty years on the individual and the community are analysed.
Read more: “PARLATE A BASSA VOCE” BY ESMERALDA CALABRIAAnd it is he whom Esmeralda Calabria – editor, among others, of Nanni Moretti and Giuseppe Piccioni -, in her first attempt behind the camera, uses as a “cicerone” for her story, rejecting the convention of so much cinema of the real of having only one narrator and choosing instead to make him converse, in front of the camera, with friends and relatives who have experienced what he experienced. In front of the camera, therefore, anecdotes and considerations are made between the participants, thus making the narration fluent and colloquial, and avoiding any didacticism; art, politics, ideals and identity are discussed with respect to what one is and what one wants to become.
But before looking forward, Calabria seems to want to say, one must necessarily look back, and thus return to the ‘scene of the crime’, Albania, where among the still standing vestiges of that infamous past, the wounds are still open, and one continues to wonder, even when nothing wrong has been done, if more could not have been done; all the while, as some of those interviewed recall, none of the real perpetrators has ever apologised for the atrocities perpetrated. “That was not communism,” says one former theatre actress interviewed, “it was dictatorship pure and simple“. And it is precisely the films featuring the leaders of that dictatorship that become the privileged material for Calabria who, with a thirty-year career in post-production, succeeds in making unprecedented, almost expressionist use of them: projecting them now on the wall of a cave, now on a brick wall, the director effectively evokes that climate of closure and terror from which Hasa (who, born in 1977, knew the period of instability following the fall of the regime better than the regime itself) escaped, and like him thousands of others.
Yet, even after landing and making a career in Italy, the guilt remains: guilt for having fled, guilt for not having done enough for his country in perpetual political crisis, guilt for having left his parents; and a feeling of perpetual statelessness persists. Only a direct confrontation with his homeland, strengthened by what he has learnt on the other side of that wall, as happens in the powerful finale, can put things back on an even keel.
Written by: Cristian Cerutti
Translated by: Ana Paula Da Costa Silva
In an essay on the link between reenactment and fantasy, Bill Nichols reflects on how this technique underlines the gap between past and present, but also between the subjective and objective perception of events. In this way, it creates a surreal dimension that nullifies the idea of total objectivity highlighting its impossibility. In Parkland of Decay and Fantasy, presented in the TFF40 International Documentaries competition, it is the digital image that performs the function described by Nichols through the use of new technologies and especially their capacity of altering images, as in the case of the visionary finale, where the visual evocation of ghosts is at the centre of the narration of Parkland of Desire and Fantasy[1].
Continua la lettura di “PARKLAND OF DECAY AND FANTASY” BY CHENLIANG ZHUArticle by: Francesco Dubini
Translated by: Giuliano Gisotti
On August 4, 2020, a massive explosion destroyed the port of Beirut, killing 220 people and injuring 7,000. The day just before that, director Karim Kassem had arrived in the city’s port area to shoot a film he will never make, Octopus. In its place is this Octopus: the title remains, but it is a completely different film. It is the symphonic lament of a city left voiceless.
Continua la lettura di “OCTOPUS” BY KARIM KASSEMTranslated by: Benedetta Francesca De Rossi
Article by: Francesco Ghio
“So Abraham got up early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and then he got up and went to the place of which God had told him.” Genesis 22:3
The biblical account shows that Abraham, moved by great faith, had no hesitation. Leonid, however, is a pagan, Leonid does not believe. And in order to offer the best future to his progeny, he is willing to transgress ethical norms and human laws, consequently going so far as to defy God.
READ ALLArticle by: Giuseppe Catalano
Translated by: Alice Bettinelli
A class in its last year of high school, a wild party in a remote cottage in the woods of Lithuania, a masked serial killer. These few elements are enough for any horror connoisseur to guess where Jonas Trukanas will take us with the narrative of Pensive, his first work competing in the “Crazies” section of the 40th edition of the Torino Film Festival.
READ ALLArticle by Fabio Bertolotto
Translated by Maria Bellantoni
The Fire Within is a film that focuses less on Herzog’s interest in volcanoes – already demonstrated in La Soufrière (1977) and Into the Inferno (2016) – than on the work of Katia and Maurice Krafft. A requiem, as the subtitle suggests, that revolves around the death of the two famous volcanologists while they were closely studying those giants towards which they felt a real obsession.
read allArticle by: Marta Faggi
Translated by: Rachele Pollastrini
“Huesera”, in Spanish, refers to an expert in treatment of bones and joints diseases. The term, however, also designates The Woman of the Bones, a figure from Mexican mythology whose task is to gather the bones of the dead, symbol of the vital force that doesn’t wear out, and to pray until flesh returns to inhabit those remains, recreating life from disjointed parts. The bones of Valeria (Natalia Solián), in Huesera, constantly creaking, because getting her fingers and the joints of her back crinckled is the protagonist’s way of trying (and not always succeeding) to drain its discomfort out of the body, her frustrations, her ineptitudes. Tormenting Valeria is the awareness that she will soon be a mother: a motherhood apparently sought after, but intimately unwanted.
Continua la lettura di “HUESERA” BY MICHELLE GARZA CERVERAGodland, ultimo film di Hlynur Pálmason, già vincitore della sezione lungometraggi del Torino Film Festival con A white, white day (2019), è una storia di frontiera, il racconto di un prete e fotografo danese (Helliott Crosset Hove) costretto a percorrere l’impervio territorio islandese per raggiungere un villaggio della costa sud-occidentale e costruirci una chiesa. Della spiritualità religiosa, tuttavia, rimane solo il corpo – la carne del mondo nella sua ineluttabile decomposizione. Una spiritualità, quindi, costantemente rigettata nella visceralità delle carni animali, nella trivialità del fango fuori dalle chiese e nell’imprevisto volo di una mosca sul volto senza macchia di un prete.
Article by: Federico Lionetti
Translated by: Noemi Zoppellaro
Godland, the latest film by Hlynur Pálmason, already winner of the feature film section of the Torino Film Festival with A white, white day (2019), is a frontier story, an account of a Danish priest and photographer (Helliott Crosset Hove) forced to travel across the impervious Icelandic territory in order to reach a village on the southwest coast and to build a church there. However, it is only the body that remains from the religious spirituality – the flesh of the world in its inevitable decomposition. A spirituality, therefore, that constantly falls into the viscerality of the animal flesh, into the triviality of the mud outside the churches and into the unexpected flight of a fly on the spotless face of a priest.
READ MOREArticle by: Alice Ferro
Translated by: Arianna Deiro
A neat line of shops appears on screen, billboards sparkle on the walls and the vibrant technicolour of the Sixties almost gives us a sense of peace. It looks like a typical post-war American city, quiet and geometric, maybe too much. The narrating voice asks, “What are we looking at?” and a doubt awakens in us: the buildings are as fake as panels of a set design, the roads look as if they’ve never been walked on, the paint on the signs is new and shiny. This is Riotsville, one of the fake cities built by the American government in the Sixties as military training bases. In these cities, crowds of plain-clothes soldiers staged riots, complete with an audience and cheers, so that their colleagues could learn how to contain them, all in preparation for the civil rights protests that would unleash in the Summer.
Continua la lettura di “RIOTSVILLE, USA” BY SIERRA PETTENGILLArticle by: Marta Faggi
Translated by: Lia Colombo
Michi (Chieko Baishô) evokes memories of her past over the phone: she goes through her life with great melancholy, and she appears grateful to have someone to listen to her. Nothing but her own voice can be heard in her kitchen. On the end of the phone, we find Yoko (Yumi Kawai). She is much younger than her and she remains silent. Even though she would be interested in the old woman’s story, her head is elsewhere. A sudden alarm interrupts Michi’s flow of words: her time is up. Yoko is holding back tears. Eventually Yoko explains to her what will happen the next day and she keeps begging her not to do “it”. Michi hushes “Sayonara.”
read allArticle by: Alice Ferro
Translated by: Cora Bruno
Carlos hangs up the phone and leans against the wall. His eyes are glazed over and he would like to vent but he doesn’t because, as he says, “men don’t cry.” This is the conflict that Un Varón, Fabian Hernández’s new film, sets out to investigate: that of a young man who tries to conform to the ideal of masculinity that prevails on the streets of Bogotá while in private he just wants to be himself. Christmas is approaching and his only wish is to spend it with his increasingly elusive sister and his mother, who is in jail. Leaving the youth center that took him in, he finds himself coming to terms with street life and the law of the alpha male.
read allArticle by: Federico Lionetti
Translated by: Niccolò Sereno
At the University of Turin, on 29 and 30 November, the study conference “Being an actor. Paths and dialogues on training and acting” organized by the “F-ACTOR” project in collaboration with UniVerso and curated by Professor Mariapaola Pierini was held. The conference is part of the research plan of the “F-ACTOR” project, dedicated to the mapping of the actor’s profession in the contemporary Italian media scenario, according to methodologies and study perspectives that refer to performance studies, studies on stardom and media production studies.
Continua la lettura di “BEING AN ACTOR. PATHS AND DIALOGUES ON TRAINING AND ACTING”Article by: Federico Lionetti
Translated by: Anna Polimeni
Carlo Rivolta was a young talent of Italian journalism during the ’77 protest movements, a figure unknown to most, yet capable of describing firsthand the upheavals of this historical period. The crisis of ideologies, the internal clashes of the movement and, above all, the spread of heroin that condemned him, and an entire generation, to an untimely demise.
Continua la lettura di “HEROIN: THE LOST GENERATION” BY MARCO TURCO
