Three Italian Movies to be featured at SF International Film Festival

The upcoming 56th San Francisco International Film Festival will feature a wide selection of diverse and innovative cinema from all over the world to the Bay Area audience.  The SFIFF is the longest-running film festival in the Americas.

 

The Festival will run from April 25 to May 9 at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, the Castro Theatre and New People Cinema in San Francisco, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. Almost 200 movies have been selected for this year’s annual spring showcase, including three Italian films in the World Cinema section.

 

The first of the Italian films represents the comeback after nine years of one of Italy’s most important directors, Bernardo Bertolucci, who with Me and You (Io e Te, 2012) directed his first Italian-language film in thirty years. This is the first Italian-language film directed by Bertolucci in thirty years. The drama is an adaptation of Niccolò Ammaniti’s novel of the same name, and was also screened out of competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Returning to the hermetic environments that made his prior two films The Dreamers (2003) and Besieged (1998) so memorable, Bertolucci’s latest film is a brother-and-sister tale that takes place predominantly in a basement storage area. Bertolucci’s work takes little more from the book than the obvious psychoanalytic framework.

 

Continuing his minimalist phase, Me and You is Bertolucci’s third in a string of films mostly set in claustrophobic, very suburban interiors, showing the self-confinement of an obsessive narcissist who is saved and led out into the world by a woman. Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori), a 14-year-old from a well-to-do family, takes no interest whatsoever in the outside world, and withdraws into himself completely; pretending to go on a school skiing trip, he shuts himself in the basement of his mother’s apartment building for an entire week. But the basement turns out to be a regular refuge for Olivia (Tea Falco), his heroin-addicted older half-sister, and so Lorenzo doesn’t find the perfect solitude he’s looking for.

 

As the two attempt to come to terms with their fractured family upbringing, they try find a way out of their respectively maladjusted lives. If the Berlusconi era is partly to blame, Bertolucci keeps that on a purely suggestive level, though he’s stated in an interview that the former prime minister “anaesthetized the brains of young people.”

 

The other recently produced movie is Il Futuro (2012), an original Italian and Chilean co-production by Chilean filmmaker Alicia Scherson, who returns to the SF Film Festival with her third feature, an adaptation of the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s novella, Una novelita lumpen.

 

When her parents die in a car accident, adolescent Bianca’s universe is upended. Staying alone in the family’s Rome apartment and entrusted with the care of her younger brother, Tomas, she struggles to hold things together as her place in her surreal new world becomes blurry. They welcome two strangers into their parents’ house and together they come up with a plan to get money: to steal from Maciste, an ex-Mr Universe living alone in an abandoned dark mansion.

 

Il Futuro is about finding ways of surviving tragedy and keep going after everything goes really wrong. It’s also about old movies, tired heroes, ancient Rome, contemporary Europe, bodybuilders, hair-dressers and the future. It is a film about being young and alone but also about friendship and family.

 

The third and final of the Italian movies selected by the Film Society is an old classic, The Mattei Affair (originally Il Caso Mattei), a 1972 film directed by Francesco Rosi, written by poet, writer and screenwriter Tonino Guerra. The film shared the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival of that year.

 

Starring the great Gian Maria Volonté in the leading role, it depicts the life and mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, an Italian businessman who in the aftermath of World War II managed to avoid the sale of the nascent Italian oil and hydrocarbon industry to US companies and developed them in the Eni, a state-owned oil company which rivaled the ‘seven sisters’ for oil and gas deals in northern African and Middle Eastern countries.

 

 “The most powerful Italian since Caesar,” Mattei railed against American and Western European oil monopolies, created alliances with Third World nations (“Mao is right,” he said), and brought Italy a measure of economic self-control through his own oil deals.

 The Mattei Affair was restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with The Film Foundation, Paramount Pictures, and Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino. The restoration was funded by Gucci, Eni, and The Film Foundation.

 

The San Francisco International Film Festival will run over a fifteen days period with an extraordinary selection of film culture and modern discovery, featuring world-class movies and live events, 14 juried awards and $70,000 in cash prizes, upwards of 100 participating filmmaker guests and diverse and engaged audiences with more than 70,000 in attendance. 

 

For screening dates and times please visit the SFIFF56 website, now live at festival.sffs.org

 56th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 25-May 9, 2013 – 

 

Showings:

Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Sun, 5/5 3:45 PM

Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Tue, 5/7 4:00 PM

Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Tue, 5/7 6:45 PM

Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Wed, 5/8 9:30 PM

Pacific Film Archive, Thu, 5/9 8:50 PM

Pacific Film Archive, Sat, 4/27 6:15 PM

Castro Theatre, Sun, 5/5 1:30 PM