17/09/2008

After the controversy surrounding it at the Locarno Film Festival, Il sol dell'avvenire is finally reaching Italian audiences. The documentary by Gianfranco Pannone, which investigates the beginnings of the Red Brigades and sparked a harsh clash between the director and Minister of Culture Sandro Bondi, is the most highly anticipated event of the second Salina Doc Fest (September 22-28).

This year’s programme is made up of four film sections. The International Competition – in name more than anything, seeing as how of the 10 selected films, only one, Barcelone ou la mort by French-Senegalese-Irish filmmaker Idrissa Guiro, comes from abroad – is dedicated to "Fughe e approdi" (“Flights and Landings”) and offers better-known films (such as Barbara Cupisti’s David di Donatello winner Madri and Suddenly, Last Winter by Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi), as well as lesser-known titles (including Come un uomo sulla terra by Andrea Segre e Dagmawi Yimer).

Documentiamoci instead is an ad hoc section for the inhabitants of the island of Salina, who are given the chance to discover important titles in contemporary documentary filmmaking, such as Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and To Have, Darwin’s Nightmare by Hubert Sauber and Alina Marazzi’s Un'ora sola ti vorrei.

The sidebar La Finestra sul Presente opens on more recent works, all of them Italian. The opening night film is Biùtiful Cauntri by Esmeralda Calabria, Andrea D'Ambrosio and Peppe Ruggiero, but there is a lot of buzz about Pippo Del Bono, who will present a clip of his upcoming project, Primi passi (“First Steps”).

For the retrospective "Reperti di memoria", the festival looks at the ever-current Pier Paolo Pasolini, with the classics Sopralluoghi in Palestina and Assembly of Love, and the recent "hypothetical reconstruction” of Pasolini’s La rabbia, by Giuseppe Bertolucci.

There will also be theatre in Salina (with Lello Arena, who stars in Ruggero Cappuccio’s Shakespea Re di Napoli), as well as literature (with the presentation of the "Dal testo allo schermo" award to Vincenzo Cerami), and events of a more theoretical nature, such as the discussion "Il nuovo cinema italiano: autori a confronto" (whose participants include, among others, Mimmo Calopresti and Luigi Lo Cascio).

(Translated from Italian)