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VENICE 2010 Critics’ Week

SIC’s 25th anniversary a continental affair

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Disturbing women, dysfunctional families and crises are just some of the leitmotifs of International Critics’ Week (SIC), the Venice Film Festival sidebar of debut films, which today revealed its 2010 programme. Above all crises, which leapt from the screen to the books, in the form of budget cuts – the contribution from the Veneto Region has decreased – that have not made the 25th edition of SIC easy.

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For this important anniversary, SIC is celebrating by screening one of its many titles from its first quarter century: Notte italiana (1987), the little-seen feature debut of Carlo Mazzacurati, who, if rumours are true, could be the only Italian filmmaker on the Lido with two films (along with his new La Passione, possibly in Competition).

Excluding closing night film Limbunan from the Philippines – all the films in the line-up are world premieres and most European. Of the seven films vying for the International Critics’ Week Award (besides the Lion of the Future - Debut Film Award, for which films from many sections compete), five are European, yet Mexico’s Martha and Israeli title Naomi by Eitan Zur were both co-produced by the French.

While France is present, says SIC Delegate General Francesco Di Pace, with Alix Delaporte’s Angele et Tony, a film that is “very French in its capacity to unite an observation of the real with an emotional analysis”, Italy offers the “not very Italian” Hai Paura del Buio (“You’re Afraid of the Dark”) by Massimo Coppola. This portrait of two women takes that place in Romania and Italy’s Basilicata Region was produced by Indigo Film and will be released domestically by BIM at the end of September.

One particularly anticipated work is the directorial debut of Swedish actress Pernilla August, Beyond, featuring the star of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Niels Arden Oplev
interview: Søren Stærmose
film profile
]
, Noomi Rapace.

The SIC selection committee pointed out two other titles that will surely surprise audiences: Oča by Slovenia’s Vlado Škafar, a uniquely poetic examination of a father-son relationship; and Syllas Tzoumerkas’s Greek film Hora proelefsis, inspired by classic Greek tragedies, which through the story of a family speaks of an entire society.

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(Translated from Italian)

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