(by Daniela Giammusso).
This year's edition of Ischia Film
Festival opens on June 30 with a heap of top directors: Oscar
prizewinner Gabriele Salvatores; Gabriele Muccino, who returns
to the Campania island a year on from the set of A Casa Tutti
Bene; Carlo Verdone, who celebrates the 40th anniversary of his
television debut in Non-Stop; and Peter Greenaway, with the
preview of The Greenaway Alphabet directed by his wife Saskia
Boddeke.
The line-up at the International Film Location Festival
directed by Michelangelo Messina and Boris Sollazzo at the
mediaeval Aragon Castle includes 113 films - of which 33
previews (including Gringo starring Charlize Theron and the
crazy comedy Army of One starring Nicolas Cage) - 78 meetings
and 30 countries represented, plus the best of Italian cinema
from the last year.
"Recounting cinema and the territory also means recounting
other places," Messina says.
"I believe that only 3-4 festivals in Italy present a
three-figure programme," continues Sollazzo.
"The aim is to create a place of memory where past and future
are present."
Sport is a major theme in the programme, and there is also a
strong presence of non-Italian films in the International
competition section on the theme 'Location denied'.
The idea "is to recount inaccessible places such as Nepal or
the ILVA steelworks (in Taranto)," explains Sollazzo.
Films in competition include Rosario Capozzolo's 2017 film
'Peggie' on dementia, Pippo Mezzapesa's 'La Giornata' on dignity
denied in the fields of Puglia and David Fedele's 'Revenir',
part road-trip, part memoir, part journalistic investigation,
following Kumut Imesh, a refugee from the Ivory Coast now living
in France, as he returns to the African continent and attempts
to retrace the same journey that he himself took when forced to
flee civil war in his country, this time with a camera in his
hand.
'Had someone made a film on the Aquarius we would have taken
it: a non-place representing all the contradictions of this
world," Sollazzo continued.
"In our own small way we aim at a political discourse, in the
sense that culture allows us to open up new horizons to people
who don't see or are unaware," he explained.
The programme also includes a career prize for Carlo Delle
Piane, who after 70 years now concentrates on cinema products
for Sky Sport and Sky Arte, the documentary film competition,
and an exhibition on Surreal cinema at the Bourbon prison.
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