08/06/2015 - The historical festival, which was founded by Lino Micciché and Bruno Torri, turns fifty this year with a new artistic director and a special focus on young people

Bringing young people as close as possible to cinema and going back to being the preferred forum for creating future audiences. According to its newly appointed artistic director, Pedro Armocida, this is the aim of the ‘new’ Pesaro International Festival of New Cinema, the 50th edition of which will be held from 20 to 27 June. “Hence the idea to number the edition ‘50+1’, to illustrate a profound and innovative new beginning”, said the director at the presentation of the festival last Friday in Rome. “The Festival has always focused on seeking out, studying and promoting ‘new cinema’, and this is what each section of the festival aims to accomplish”.

Fitting in perfectly with the new programming lines will be the special event “Italian debuts. The twenty-tens in cinema (2010-2015)” dedicated to new Italian directors. The 20 films selected for the event include Salvo [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fabio Grassadonia and Anton…
interview: Sara Serraiocco
film profile] by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, The Interval [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Leonardo Di Costanzo
film profile] by Leonardo Di Costanzo, Seven Acts of Mercy [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Gianluca De Serio and Massimiliano De Serio, Corpo celeste [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alice Rohrwacher
film profile] by Alice Rohrwacher and N-Capace [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Eleonora Danco, as well as comedies such as I Can Quit Whenever I want [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sydney Sibilia
film profile] by Sidney Sibilia and Easy! [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Francesco Bruni, and directorial debuts by actors, such as Miele [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Valeria Golino
interview: Valeria Golino
film profile] by Valeria Golino andThe Ideal City [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Luigi Lo Cascio.

The Pesaro New Cinema Competition features six films by emerging directors from various film industries: from South America with Chilean film La madre del cordero by Enrique Farías and Rosario Espinosa and Argentinian film La mujer de los perros by Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás, to the United States with Petting Zoo by Micah Magee, to Europe with French film A Young Poet [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Daniel Manivel and Italian film Terra by Marco De Angelis and Antonio Di Trapani, to Iran with A Minor Leap Down by Hamed Rajabi. Awarding the prize named after Lino Micciché, the founder of the Festival together with Bruno Torri, will be a jury presided over by Francesca Neri made up, for the first time, of students from film schools and universities.

The Super8 section will feature the works of five European artists – Livio Colombo, Philippe Cote, Helga Fanderl, Jaap Pieters and Giulia Vallicelli – who obstinately continue to make their films using photographic film, screening them in one-off events. The traditional ‘open-air’ evening screenings held in the main square in Pesaro will kick off with the screening of Jaws by Steven Spielberg, exactly forty years on from its first public screening in the United States. The final evening of the Festival (27 June), on the other hand, will see the international premiere of Peter Marcias’ new film, La nostra quarantena [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (which is due to be released in theatres in September under the distribution of Cinecittà Luce).

This year the festival will pay tribute, through a selection of films and meetings with different figures, to Pier Paolo Pasolini, forty years on from his tragic death and exactly fifty years since he attended the first conference organised by the Festival at which he read his famous ‘Cinema of Poetry’. The Pesaro Film Festival will also be an opportunity, this year, to become acquainted with the work of Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, one of the biggest and most highly-esteemed Turkish artists (also a novelist and painter), whose films are set in the poor, run-down and often ignored suburbs of Istanbul.

For the detailed programme of events, meetings and screenings, click here.

(Translated from Italian)