18/07/2014 - Also in competition Eugène Greens' Franco-Italian co-production La sapienza. Out of competition Gianfranco Pannone's documentary Sul Vulcano

Bonifacio Angius's Perfidia and Eugène Green's Franco-Italian co-production (MACT Productions and La Sarraz Pictures) La sapienza are (read the article) among the films competing for the Golden Leopard in the international competition section of the 67th Locarno Film Festival, which will be held from 6 to 16 August. Chairing the jury is director Gianfranco Rosi (Golden Lion for Sacro G.R.A. [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gianfranco Rosi
film profile]). Alongside these two movies and Out of Competition is Gianfranco Pannone's documentary Sul Vulcano.

The only Italian director battling it out in the international competition is 32-year-old Bonifacio Angius from Sassari in Sardinia – who specialised at the New York Film Academy and at the Catalonian Centre for Cinema Studies – with his first feature film. Angius is also behind the screenplay for Perfidia with Fabio Bonfanti and Maria Accardi. This is the story of a father and son who become close when it's already too late: Angelo, loveless and jobless, spends his empty days in a dreary bar in the suburbs of an anonymous provincial town, daydreaming of the most trivial normality. Peppino is a father who was never interested in his son, an old man well aware of not having much time left in this life. “It's a movie that's deeply bound to our modern era, born out of memories, situations lived and imagined by me or by people whom I've met”, explained Angius. In the cast are Stefano Deffenu, Mario Olivieri, Noemi Medas, Alessandro Gazzale, Andrea Carboni and Domenico Montixi. “All of the actors in Perfidia belong to the place where the movie was filmed, within the story there's also a part of them, of their humanity and of their lives”.

Director of photography is Pau Castejòn Ubeda, the producer is Francesco Paolo Montini for Movie Factory in Rome, and associate producers are Grazia Porqueddu and Bonifacio Angius of Il Monello Film in Sassari.

Pannone's new documentary film takes place on Vesuvius. It will be distributed in the autumn by Luce Cinecittà which is co-producing with Bruno Tribbioli and Alessandro Bonifazi for Blue Film with RAI Cinema and with the contribution of MiBac. Maria, Matteo and Yole: three lives at the foot of the volcano, in a place that is like no other in the world, full of myths, history and literary references. Between stories of lives lived, precious film archive material and literary references that range from Giordano Bruno to the Marquis De Sade, from Giacomo Leopardi to Curzio Malaparte, Sul Vulcano strives to give meaning to a “mad land”.

Italians at Locarno were also faring well in the Film-makers of the Present Competition, reserved for first and second works from emerging directors from all over the world, in which Simone Rapisarda Casanova's (Canada/Italy) La creazione di significato with Pacifico Pieruccioni, Alexander Auf der Heyde, and Benjamin Auf der Heyde was selected. As part of the Titanus Retrospective, Luchino Visconti's The Leopard will be shown in Piazza Grande, while Dario Argento will feature among the hosts of the retrospective "Titanus. Family chronicle of Italian cinema" and will introduce the screening of his first feature-film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Alessandro De Leo and Federico Di Corato's The Hovel and Yuri Ancarani's San Siro appear in the Leopards of Tomorrow Competition which displays short and medium-length films directed by young independent artists or by cinema school students.

(Translated from Italian)