Programme 2015 |Our Guests | Sponsors | Tickets & Venues
Live from the 2015 edition
We are pleased to share with you all the success of our Italian Film Festival Cardiff.
The films forced us to ask uncomfortable questions such as: which side are we on? Are we On the Bride’s Side or rather, complacently guarding the borders of Fortress Europe letting people die while trying to reach its shores? All screenings and Q&As compelled us to deal with some of the uncomfortable aspects of Italy and to move beyond the stereotypes of the Bel Paese. A country intending to grow both economically and ethically needs to explore its darker sides and expose them, as Nicola Campiotti beautifully did in his Sarà un paese.
Italy is of course a “metaphor” to paraphrase Leonardo Sciascia. In this case a metaphor for the West, its ambitions, its tensions, its incredible diversity of languages and cultures, colours and shapes.
For those of you who weren’t able to attend or were only able to see part of the Italian Film Festival here’s a short account of what you missed:
Between October 10 and October 17 the Italian Cultural Centre Wales launched the first ever Italian Film Festival Cardiff (IFFC). The festival showed a range of contemporary films, all premièring in Wales and most of them in the UK too, with themes ranging from poetry to gender and migration. This selection included a variety of genres of Italian cinematography with a strong emphasis on new narrative forms and independent productions.
We couldn’t have hoped for a better welcome for Italian cinema to Cardiff: all the screenings were sold out and the Q&As were inspiring and engaging.
Our first film, Più buio di mezzanotte by Sebastiano Riso was hosted by the Iris Prize Festival at Cineworld and its main actor, Davide Capone, won the best actor prize. We were thrilled to break the news to Davide with a video message, together with director Riso, who was in Cardiff to present his film. Riso’s Q&A is available here.
The screening of L’arbitro by Paolo Zucca and Io sto con la sposa by Antonio Augugliaro, Gabriele Del Grande and Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry was preceded by a reception, in Penarth Pier Pavilion, provided by our golden sponsors the Italian restaurant Casanova and VinItalia. Both films were followed by two very engaging Q&As with their directors Paolo Zucca and Gabriele Del Grande.
The festival continued at Chapter Arts Cinema with Sarà un paese by Nicola Campiotti, a docu-film that aims to explain contemporary Italy, its issues and its hopes for the future, to a young audience. The screening was preceded by a workshop for children, introducing the film and focusing on its main themes. In the evening Il giovane favoloso by Mario Martone explored the beauty of poetry and Le cose belle by Agostino Ferrente and Giovanni Piperno, showed the crude reality and disillusion of young people in Naples, themes that were further developed in the Q&A with director Agostino Ferrente and producer Antonella di Nocera.