Three Italian films will run at the Cannes Film Festival next month: they are Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre (My Mother), Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth and Matteo Garrone’s Il Racconto dei Racconti (Tale of the Tales). 
   
Moretti’s film Mia Madre stars American actor John Turturro and Italian Margherita Buy as a director shooting a film while her mother is dying in hospital.
Sorrentino’s English-language film stars Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine as an ageing writer and a composer reflecting on life and art while on vacation in the Alps.
Tale of the Tales by Garrone stars Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel and Alba Rohrwacher, based on a collection of stories by 17th-century Neapolitan author Giambattista Basile.
   
As The Cannes Film Festival programmers’ selection of three Italian films for competition is a reward to the Italian cinema, which is speaking to the world once again, as it did during the beautiful post-war years and during the economic boom.

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