29/07/2010

The 42 Italian titles throughout the various sections of this year’s Venice Film Festival (September 1-11) would seem to constitute a festival-within-a festival.

The four films in Competition have been a given for weeks among industry buzz (including the controversy by the excluded Pupi Avati, who didn’t want his Una sconfinata giovinezza screening Out of Competition): Mario Martone period epic We Believed; Carlo Mazzacurati’s meta-cinematic The Passion; Saverio Costanzo’s The Solitude of Prime Numbers, from the bestseller; and “outsider” title La pecora nera (“The Black Sheep”) Ascanio Celestini, based on his theatre play on mental institutions.

Out of Competition will see Michele Placido’s Vallanzasca; Marco Bellocchio’s Sorelle Mai; Sei Venezia, also by Mazzacurati; Piergiorgio Gay’s doc Niente paura on l rocker Luciano Ligabue (at Venice last year in the jury); Emidio GrecoNotizie degli scavi’s (with Ambra Angiolini and Giuseppe Battiston); and Stefano Incerti’s Gorbaciof, starring Toni Servillo (whose musican brother Peppe appears in Passione, John Turturro’s documentary on Neapolitan music).

Horizons’ Italian names have already been announced (see news), which leaves the jam-packed Controcampo Italiano, the competitive sidebar dedicated to domestic films that this year also includes shorts and out-of-competition events. The section’s most anticipated titles are opener Roberta Torre’s I baci mai dati, Aureliano Amadei’s debut feature20 sigarette (on the massacre in Nassiriya, Iraq); Giada Colagrande’s A Woman, starring her husband William Dafoe; Paola Randi’s debut Into Paradiso; and the documentary Ma che storia by Gianfranco Pannone.

(Translated from Italian)