11/06/2013 - A new festival conceived and directed by Deborah Young will take place in Florence and its surroundings on June 14-16. Guests include Ari Folman, Youssef Nabil and Max Mazzotta

Local art, culture and beauty will meet in Florence and its surrounding region over three days for a new festival entitled Trasparenze in Tuscany (June 14-16). The event has been conceived and is being directed by Deborah Young. After her Mediterranean experience as artistic director at the Taormina Festival for five years, the journalist and Variety cinema critic, turned international film editor for The Hollywood Reporter “felt the necessity to collect the diffused threads that now characterise modern culture and my own interests.” Trasparenze in Tuscany stemmed from this idea, and will feature cinema industry players, photography, art, music and other communication expressions like graphic design and cartoons.

“A festival made out of glimpses of objects behind the confusion of our times,” Deborah Young explained. “The world is alive and culture is vibrant. All you need to do is look at the creativity of the more independent and Italian cinema.”

The festival will feature two Italian films: Viaggio sola [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Maria Sole Tognazzi, which first screening will be in San Casciano where part of it was filmed. The film will then go directly on to the Shanghai Film Festival, one of the event’s partners. Fiabeschi torna a Casa, Max Mazzotta’s film debut will be premiering. Mazzotta played Andrea Pazienza’s cartoon character ten years ago in Paz! by Renato De Maria.

Between live action and animation film, Ari Folman’s The Congress [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (photo) will open the festival, after opening Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. Israeli director, known for his film Walz with Bashir [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], will make an appearance at the screening of his visionary film, inspired by novel The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem and will take part on a panel on cartoons on the festival’s last day. Cartoon artists, including Marina Comandini, Stefano Babini and Dariush Radpour will do a live performance and will open up for a conversation with their audience.

One of the Arab world’s most innovative contemporary photographers, Youssef Nabil, will present You Never Left, an eight-minute short with Fanny Ardant and Tahar Rahim, which expresses the metaphor of a lost Egypt through images, in a kind of parallel between exile and death. Nabil will also be one of the main features during Trasparenze in Tuscany’s bio-conversations, which will take place on the Saturday afternoon in San Casciano dei Bagni.

The festival is being patronised by the communes involved in the initiative: Florence, San Casciano dei Bagni and Orbetello, as well as the region of Tuscany, the province of Siena and Tuscany’s Sistema Foundation.

(Translated from Italian)