mbonafedefilmfestivals2018-blog

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This is the Cinecittà web site. Interesting and useful because it contains all the latest updates from Cinecittà and cinematography in general.

The website is available in English language too.

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The short film was made in 2008, during a break from the shooting of the film “Polytechnique”, awarded at the Cannes Film Festival during the Critics Week. The film, for the most part without dialogues, sees a group of 11 people stuffing themselves with food and a banquet. The film could represent a metaphor on the infernal punishment for the sin of the throat. Critically, Villeneuve lashes out against the voracious and destroyed human society in the era of consumerism.

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My five favorite films

1) Gladiator: The magnificent Gladiator is a sprawling, enthralling Roman orgy of blood, passion, betrayal and revenge. It is monumental movie-making: visually thrilling, technically astonishing, and emotionally engaging.Rome, is outstanding (anachronistic, computer-generated "helicopter" shot of the Colosseum included). The key to Gladiator's greatness is Russell Crowe's career-best performance in the lead role.As Maximus Decimus Meridius, he is obliged to combine the courage of the world with the political sense of a devoted family; and he does so brightly, laser stare or a barely intelligible growl. He is simply mesmerizing.Maximus's troubles begin after he has conquered the rebellious tribes of Germany and learns that Caesar (Richard Harris) has chosen him as his successor. When Caesar's son, the whingeing wimp Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), finds out, he grabs power for himself with breathtaking brutality. Maximus flees but is sold into slavery, ending up as a gladiator in Rome, where he eventually confronts the snivelling architect of his misfortunes in the arena.It's an epic tale - most of it pure fiction - eloquently told. But, though the film bagged five Oscars, which was endlessly quotable script ("At my signal, unleash hell") was mystifyingly overlooked. 

2) Gomorra: Matteo Garrone has created a gruelling species of neo-neorealist Italian cinema from Roberto Saviano's bestselling book Gomorra, about the power and reach of the Neapolitan mob: the camorra. The title's bleak play on words is almost inaudible beneath the film's thundering detonation. After the final credits, it is hard to escape the fear, even the despair, that this whole area all of Naples, all of southern Italy, is suitable.The action takes place mostly in and around the tenement buildings of Scampìa in Naples; Garrone presents it as a multi-stranded epic of various characters in various stages up the food chain. The mob has been split by a turf war, called a "secession", signalled in the film's first minute by a grisly gang hit on some camorristi in a tanning salon: plump, self-admiring, nude wiseguys bathed in an eerie blue light, who are shot dead by a blank-faced crew; the killers impassively deposit their weapons in a sports bag held open for them by a female associate waiting for them in the foyer. Then, and at all other times in the film, no police officers or other authority figures take any sort of effective or preventive action, and the Roman Catholic church is utterly absent. The resulting war divides loyalties, and creates ruptures and fissions that discharge individual stories like jetsam.Marco (Marco Macor) and Piselli (Ciro Petrone) are two brash teenagers, obsessed with Brian de Palma's Scarface and with becoming local bosses themselves: a flukey success stealing cocaine at the very beginning emboldens them to draw attention to themselves with suicidally flashy behaviour. An even younger boy, perhaps 12 or 13, is Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese); he yearns to join the mob, but in the meanwhile earns a few euros picking up shopping for a local woman whose husband appears to be "away". Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is a harassed bean-counter employed by the camorra to patrol the estate's grim walkways and dole out a grotesque sort of maundy-money to its various mendicants and pensioners: widows, the elderly, those who in general need to be kept pacified. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a camorra tailor presiding over vast sweatshops: engine rooms for the fashion industry. He puts himself in mortal danger by giving lucrative "lessons" to Chinese competitors, and has an epiphany of pure horror when he watches TV coverage of Scarlett Johansson at the Venice film festival wearing an outfit that seems worryingly familiar.Finally, and most nauseatingly, there is the chilling, semi-legitimate figure of Franco, played by the incomparable Toni Servillo, a businessman who offers dumping grounds for toxic waste, importing carcinogens from all over the EU by falsifying importation documents, disregarding safety procedures and working with camorra families to gain access to the land where the cancer-inducing garbage can be dumped. (He talks about a shadowy "Zio" figure who turns out to be a hatchet-faced monster who wants the troublesome Marco and Piselli dealt with.) So the cancer rate thereabouts climbs inexorably upwards, while gangsters get rich and get high and get shot in the head.It is not a mob film in the classical vein, because there is no Scarface or central boss figure with whom we are tacitly allowed to become fascinated. There are just scattered villains and victims, filmed with loose, freewheeling energy and attack. The gloomy, underlit interiors are in contrast to spectacular setpieces in broad daylight, such as an extraordinary wedding procession and most appallingly when Marco and Piselli steal some assault rifles from a camorra weapons dump and, as excited as the children they in fact are, try them out on a deserted stretch of wetland. They have first stripped to their underpants, perhaps because they thought their clothes would become stained. (With cordite? Smoke? Blood?) Their gunfire is ear-splittingly, brain-frazzlingly real, and given how commonplace guns and gunfire are in the movies, it is remarkable how rare this is. Garrone also interestingly conveys what the human face looks like when a gun is fired very close by. There are many scenes when we see the bystander's shock; the face goes into spasm, a microsecond after becoming entirely blank, like that of an animal or a corpse.And beneath all this is the corrupt business of importing waste: literally undermining the entirety of southern Italy with the reckless digging and dumping of poisonous industrial excrement, turning the nation into a gigantic public lavatory, a process facilitated by corruption, by a menacing gangster culture enforcing easy land sales, and by a cynical Italian government. The movie omits that part of Roberto Saviano's book which deals with the camorra's link with Britain. But it certainly leaves us pondering the fact that British, and all EU members, donate the money and the political respectability which serves to cover up the whole dysfunctional business. Gomorrah is a powerful example of of that thrilling current of energy which right now is lighting up Italian cinema.

3) Cinema Paradiso: If ever a movie came from the heart, it was Giuseppe Tornatore's nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988) now getting a rerelease to celebrate its silver jubilee. A successful but jaded film director recalls his Sicilian childhood: he was a cheeky scamp called Totò (Salvatore Cascio) helping out in the cinema booth, learning to love movie magic and becoming a friend to the old projectionist Salvatore (Philippe Noiret), in a special place whose movies were censored by the local priest, and whose interior was designed to look like a church, with an altar under the screen. Cinema Paradiso is much loved, though I have occasionally been the man in the Bateman cartoon: the reviewer who confessed to finding Cinema Paradiso a bit sugary and the kid really annoying.There's a scene in which Salvatore confesses to the appalled priest his doubts about the loaves and the fishes: journalists have looked similarly outraged when I have murmured my heretical thoughts aloud. It is perhaps down to Ennio Morricone's syrupy score with its disconcerting melodic resemblance to I've Never Been In Love Before from Guys and Dolls. There's no doubt about the brilliance of its central scene: by twisting the projector's glass screen on a fine summer's night, Salvatore reflects the movie image out into the town square, spread over a neighbouring building, for a glorious open-air performance: the sacred spirit has escaped the temple, with exciting but ultimately catastrophic results. And the final "kiss montage" scene is inspired. It's a real experience and a classic. But a sweet tooth is necessary.

4) On my skin: Director Alessio Cremonini painstakingly reconstructs the high-profile true-crime case of 31-year-old Stefano Cucchi, a former heroin addict arrested by the Italian military police for possession of drugs and beaten so sadistically he died in custody a week later, in On My Skin (Sulla mia pelle). As tensely focused as a thriller, the film is gripping from start to finish, which is surprising given the familiarity of the case in Italy. One of its main assets is rising star Alessandro Borghi, who lends searing credibility to the doomed youth with his low-class Roman accent and street wit, and he turns Cucchi’s seven-day decline into death into a heart-breaking calvary.  This case, which happened in 2009, is still in the appeals courts and more trials are upcoming. But Cremonini and his co-scripter Lisa Nur Sultan pull together the various conflicting legal threads into a single, powerful narrative leaving no doubt that the initial beating was the primary cause of death, aggravated by a criminal lack of medical treatment in a series of Roman hospitals. The Netflix release should give new wind to the prosecution, which has been actively spurred on by the victim’s sister Ilaria Cucchi, here played by Jasmine Trinca in a rather small supporting role.Though one of the most infamous cases of the decade and one that rocked public opinion, Cucchi’s is only one of 172 deaths of inmates that occurred in Italian prisons in the year 2009. The emphasis given to this figure at the end of this tense, grueling pic gives one pause.For those who don’t already know the story, the film opens with a hospital orderly on a locked ward discovering Stefano lifeless in his bed, seven days after he was arrested in his car for possession of 20 grams of hashish and a small amount of cocaine. His backstory begins a week earlier with the essentials of the boy’s life: work in his Dad’s engineering office, boxing workouts at the gym, attendance at Mass, carving up bricks of hash in the apartment his folks have bought for him.One night, while joking with a pal in his parked car, a carabiniere patrol car appears out of nowhere; the uniformed military police are soon joined by two off-duty officers in street clothes. When they find 10 packets of hash on Stefano, they run both boys in for questioning. It is the beginning of a nightmare of unrelenting tension. The key scene of the beating, however, takes place offscreen. In a remote police station in the middle of the night, Stefano is shoved into a cell with three officers. When he emerges his face is a mass of bruises, his back hurts and he can barely walk.His condition worsens with each passing day; he can't eat, drink or urinate. What is hard to comprehend is why he insists that “nothing happened” to him when questioned by other police officers; he ironically says that he fell down the stairs. The doctors don’t believe him, but they wash their hands of him and hide behind bureaucratic protocol when he refuses treatment. The scenes fly by swiftly in Chiara Vullo’s no-nonsense edit, with the ever-weaker youth being dragged from jail to hospital and back to jail and stumbling in front of a judge who barely glances at his swollen face. Only to some other inmates does he confess he was beaten by the police who arrested him.  This is clearly a career-changer for Borghi, whose roles have swung from a violent crime lord in Stefano Sollima’s Suburra to a mysterious lover in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Veiled Naples. He is barely recognizable with his shaved head that emphasizes his huge eyes and emaciated frame. Keeping Roberto De Angelis' production design simple and the sets verging on barren, Cremonini makes sure all the attention is focused on the protagonist. The only breakaways are to his upset older parents and his married sister Ilaria, honest middle-class people who live on the wrong side of town, but have struggled to see him clear of the drug trap. Unbelievably, they’re denied access to their son and brother, even after they’re told he’s been hospitalized, and the bureaucratic runaround they’re subjected to is inhuman.Matteo Cocco’s (Pericle) cinematography, clean and limited in its palette, manages to be striking without ever calling attention to itself. Not so the use of Mokadelic’s music, which subscribes to the common modern vice of raising the volume in a misguided attempt to dominate the mood and ends up sounding menacing but maudlin.

5) Life is beautiful: It may have been showered with awards (including three Oscars) and struck box-office gold around the world, but "La Vita è Bella" remains a deeply problematic contribution to the growing body of films about the Holocaust.Written and directed by Italian comedian Roberto Benigni, and photographed by master cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, it is a film of two distinct halves, inspired by Dante's observation that, "There is no bigger tragedy than to remember the happy times during the misery."We begin in late 1930s Tuscany, where the clownish Guido (a permanently grinning Benigni) arrives in the town of Arezzo. Dreaming of opening a bookshop, he finds temporary work as a waiter and begins to woo blushing schoolteacher Dora (Braschi, the director's wife) who's engaged to the local Fascist official. Punctuating this fairy tale love story are moments of Chaplinesque slapstick, including the Jewish Guido's bravura impersonation of a school inspector.The two lovers marry and have an adorable child Giosué (Cantarini), but then several years later the family are deported to a German-run concentration camp. There the father pretends to his son that the brutal conditions and screaming guards are part of an elaborate and bizarre game where points are awarded for good behaviour and first prize is a tank.Music changes with the development of the story, at the beginning it is a colorful, happy music, then it becomes melancholic, sad, but at the same time it is a bearer of hope. Looking at the film superficially it could be criticized negatively because, in some respects, it is in contrast with the story, but the real intent of Benigni is not to stage a documentary, but to bring a smile, even if paradoxically charged of worry and fear, where cruelty and evil reigned. This is one of the characteristic aspects of the film. The Tuscan director has avoided a flat film, too tied to reality, instead creating a film where the plot is comedy-drama, utopia-disenchantment. In fact, the comic scenes are the most dramatic, the most moving, in which a man, Guido, aware of his fate, strives to convince his son that life is beautiful and that its main ingredient is “L'Allegria” (happyness). Also, even when is being brought to be killed, he does not renounce to smile for the last time to his son. Guido knows he is going to meet death, yet he does not hesitate to wink at his son, as a sign of complicity for a "game" in which he had to  contrive any possible ways to survive and to emerge victorious. It was not just a game, it was "the game of life", in which we are often defeated by the evil, but in the end the goodness, innocence and the rationality win over it. The important thing is to hope, smile, love and believe.

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Double Bill: Rosemary’s Baby(1968) and Hereditary(2018)

The very famous incipit of Rosemary’s Baby(1968), a sequence plan of almost two minutes, gives us an overview of the Manhattan skyline to finally frame the Dakota Building, one of the most striking buildings on the Upper West Side: the place that, in the next two hours, will be the theater of the gloomy story of Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), the young woman about to move into one of the apartments in the old residential complex with her husband Guy (John Cassavetes).

Also on a building is developed the opening sequence of the film Hereditary (2018). But this is a very special building: it is in fact a miniature reconstruction of the Graham family house. The camera zoom transports us into the bedroom of the sixteen year old Peter (Alex Wolff), woken up by his father Steve (Gabriel Byrne), creating an anomalous overlap between the levels of reality and mimesis. In short, an authentic mise en abîme, that is a scenario that, inside, contains the reproduction of a subject: specifically the Graham's house, another example of “cursed house” that, like the Woodhouse's New York apartment, will become the frame of a horror capable of digging deep into the spectators’ anxieties.

Rosemary’s Baby - two minutes sequences: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8cTs2s4dI0&frags=pl%2Cwn

Hereditary - interview to Ari Aster (writer/director) and explanation of the initial scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhnGibc49XM&frags=pl%2Cwn

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This article is about Netflix's US library, apparently limited to recent movies only.

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Venice Film Festival 2018

This year’s director of the Festival was Biella-born (Piedmont region) Alberto Barbera, who helmed the festival from 1998 to April 2002, and who, to-date, is the longest-serving director in the event’s history.

The patron of this year’s festival was the Italian actor Michele Riondino, from Puglia, in the South of the country. In 2017, the festival saw an unusual role reversal with the appointment of a man rather than a woman as the host of the opening and closing events. Riondino took to the stage of Palazzo del Cinema’s Sala Grande on Wednesday evening, 29 August, during the inaugural ceremony and will host the closing ceremony on 8 September.

The international Jury of the 75th Venice Film Festival was headed by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who won last year’s award for ‘The Shape of Water,’ and two Golden Globes in 2018 as best director and best film.

According to tradition, the event kicks off on Wednesday with the opening ceremony and ends on Saturday with the prize-giving ceremony when the Golden Lion and other prizes will be awarded.

This year, the Venice Film Festival is structured as follows: the Official Selection features the Venezia 75 section which includes a maximum of 20 feature films, presented as world premieres, competing for the Golden Lion. The Out-of-Competition section features works by established directors who have already participated at past editions, documentaries or film in which the spectacular dimension is accompanied by forms of expressive or narrative originality, and the Orizzonti section, dedicated to films representing the latest aesthetic and expressive trends in international cinema, with a particular emphasis on emerging directors or new talents. The Venice Classics will host world premiere screenings of the best restorations of classic films executed over the past year. Sconfini is a non-competitive section that includes a selection of works of different genres, length and targets, while Venice Virtual Reality presents a maximum of 30 in or out-of-competition VR works, of any length or duration. Lastly, the independent, parallel sections, include the International Critics Week, featuring a maximum of eight debut works independently organized by a committee appointed by the National Syndicate of Italian Film Critics (SNCCI) in accordance with its own regulations, and the Giornate degli Autori, a series of 12 films, independently promoted by the Italian filmmakers association.

Additionally, numerous fringe-events, including retrospectives and tributes to famous people, are held during the event. This year, the Biennale asked Hotel Des Bains, a historic structure on the Lido, to host an exhibition on the history of the Film Festival, featuring materials from the Biennale’s Historic Archives, including photos, films, documents and mostly original, unpublished materials on the history of the International Festival of Cinematographic Art Awards in 2018

The Golden Lions for the Lifetime Achievement 2018 has gone to director David Cronenberg and actress Vanessa Redgrave. The Canadian horror auteur, known for a wide range of edgy films such as ‘The Fly‘ and ‘Nude Lunch,’ was praised for venturing beyond the constraints of the horror genre which marked his early career and for showing “that he wants to take his audiences well beyond the cinema of exploitation.” The British actress has declared: “Last summer I was filming in Venice in ‘The Aspern Paper.’ Many many years ago I filmed ‘La vacanza‘ in the marshes of the Veneto. My character spoke every word in the Venetian dialect. I bet I am the only non-Italian actress to act an entire role in Venetian dialect! Thank you a million dear Festival!”.

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These are the statistics arose from 2017 meeting in Venice, which are treated in the Conclusion of my essay. Unfortunately, I could not find the file in English.

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Roma review: Alfonso Cuarón returns to Venice – and Mexico – for a heart-rending triumph

he Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, whose breakthrough movie Y Tu Mamá También was such a smash in Venice in 2001, and whose outer-space disaster film Gravity did the same thing in 2013, now returns to his native language in complete triumph.

Roma is his best film so far: a thrilling, engrossing and moving picture with a richly personal story to tell, beautifully and dynamically shot in pellucid black and white. It is the tale of Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio), a young woman of Mixteco heritage working as a live-in maid for a beleaguered upper-middle class family in Mexico City.

The year is 1971: posters for the previous summer’s World Cup, held in Mexico, are still seen in one child’s bedroom. The title refers to the “Colonia Roma” district and to director’s belief that Mexico City been evolving in the four decades since into a non-imperial grandiosity, a quasi-Rome in its commotion and sprawl, and the streetscape and crowd-scene sequences Cuarón stages are truly stunning, especially his sensational evocation of the Corpus Christi massacre, when around 120 people were killed by the military during a student demonstration.

Cuarón has an extraordinary way of combining the closeup and the wide-shot, the tellingly observed detail – humorous or poignant or just effortlessly authentic – with the big picture and the sense of scale. At times it feels novelistic, a densely realised, intimate drama giving us access to domestic lives developing in what feels like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also at times like a soap opera or telenovela. And at other times it feels resoundingly like an epic.

Cleo’s personal life is beginning to unravel in tandem with that of her employer and Cuarón shows how the household, though placid enough, is under pressure. The tiled driveway, which is shown being mopped clean over the opening credits, is covered in the excrement of the family’s much-cherished dog. The man of the house, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), parks his car in this space with a wearied yet fanatical care that hints at his own unhappiness. His wife Sofía (Marina De Tavira) presides over four boisterous children, Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey), Paco (Carlos Peralta), Pepe (Marco Graf) and Sofi (Daniela Demesa), but the real work is being done by Cleo and her fellow maid Adela (Nancy García García), who are always eligible for the condescension of class and race but are nonetheless well treated. Antonio keeps going away for what are supposedly business trips and a stressed Sofía one day tells the children it would be a good idea to write to their dad, imploring him to come back. Meanwhile, Cleo has to explain to her dodgy, martial-arts enthusiast boyfriend Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) that she has missed her period.

Every scene, every character and every shot has been nurtured with loving care. There are lovely set-pieces when the family, uneasily without their patriarch at Christmas, visit an uncle – whose clan have a hair-raising love of guns and go cheerfully off for a shooting spree, with minimal warnings on safety. A New Year’s party in the country is interrupted by a dramatic forest fire – Cleo is the first to see the shimmering heat above the dark shapes of the trees, and it looks at first like a hallucination. The party atmosphere dissolves into panic, but then turns into a robustly determined group effort with someone singing what sounds like a hymn. It is mysterious and beautiful.

Back in Mexico City there is comedy and absurdity, as well as something sinister, in the militaristic mass-workout session that Fermín engages in with his aggressive comrades. Then there is the family’s subdued holiday in Veracruz, with a fateful scene at the beach. Drama and crisis pulse under the crust of normality.

The street scenes are extraordinarily good, and use terrific tracking shots. Even the film’s simplest and most apparently innocuous episodes are electrified by the pure style that Cuarón brings. And the drama comes to a head in heart-stopping, heart-rending style, amid the June riot.

At the heart of it all is a wonderful performance from Aparicio, who brings to the role something gentle, delicate, stoic and selfless. She is the jewel of this outstanding film.

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All about the 13th edition of the Rome Film Festival

The thirteenth edition of the Festa del Cinema, the annual film festival in Rome hosted at the Auditorium Parco della Musica. The building complex - designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano - will host screenings, exhibitions, celebrities, debates, conferences and panels, while the 1,300 square meters of boulevard leading to Cavea (an open air theater square) become one of the largest red carpets in the world.

The official selection of the festival consists of 38 films ranging from brand new, genre and Italian. Drew Goddard's Bad Times at The El Royale - the story of seven strangers, each with a past to hide and a secret to protect, who meet in El Royale on Lake Tahoe to get one last chance of redemption - will kick off the 13th edition of the Festival.

Do not miss The House With a Clock in the Wall, a journey through the magical adventure of Lewis Baravelt, a 10-year-old boy who moves to his uncle Jonathan's old home, where he embarks on a secret mission to discover the origin and the meaning of the hidden clock that keeps ticking inside the walls. The cast is exceptional, with Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Sunny Suljic, Colleen Camp, Lorenza Izzo and Kyle Maclachlan. Also the Watergate series by Charles Ferguson - based on one of the biggest political scandals in the history of the United States - will be presented at this edition of the festival. Not to mention the Vizio della speranza by Edoardo de Angelis.

Also this year some masterpieces of Italian cinema have been restored, including Italians, good people by Giuseppe de Santi, Mario Martone's love affair, San Michele had a rooster by Paolo Taviani and Il tempo stopped by Ermanno Olmi.

For all of you who are waiting to hear of this year's Close Encounters series, we can find 14 leading names have been involved in the film industry. From the legendary American director, Martin Scorsese (The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street), who received the Lifetime Achievement Award, to the beloved Sicilian director Giuseppe Tornatore (Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, The Best Offer) and to the famous French actress Isabelle Huppert, who also received the Lifetime Achievement Award, this year's speeches have a lot in store. Conversations with Golden Globe winners, Sigourney Weaver (Gorilla in the Mist, Avatar) and Cate Blanchett (The Aviator, Babel); famous French artist and filmmaker, Pierre Bismuth (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind); and investigations on the mysteries of cinema with Italian filmmakers Luca Bigazzi, Arnaldo Catinari, Giogiò Franchini and Esmeralda Calabria, also scheduled.

Other highlights include Joel Edgerton's Boy Erased, starring Nicole Kidman, Joel Edgerton and Lucas Hedges. Jared, the nineteen year old son of a Baptist pastor in the small American town, leaves his parents. The adolescent is faced with a crossroads: undertake sexual rehabilitation therapy or isolate himself from family, friends and faith. Based on a true story.

While Notti Magiche by Paolo Virzi - the story of three young aspiring screenwriters who are the main suspects in the murder of a famous Italian filmmaker - will close this year's festival.

After the Musicals of last year, this year's edition of "Films of our Lives" cover Noir. It is no coincidence that Peter Sellers was the face of this year's Film Festival. The image, shot by photographer Terry O'Neill during the filming of The Pink Panther (1967), captures the immense verve comedy and the brilliant unpredictability of Sellers' most famous character, Jacque Clouseau.