Greenaway to star at Ischia Film Fest

(by Daniela Giammusso).
    (ANSA) - Rome, June 19 - 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.