Bari offers premieres and Italian cinema

by Gabriele Barcaro

16/12/2009 - After the “zero edition”, which almost a year ago registered a great riscontro with audiences (20,000 ticket buyers), the festival “Per il Cinema Italiano” is changing its name, to Bari International Film & TV Festival. BIF&ST (January 23-30, 2010) will no longer focus only on domestic films but has expanded its attentions to the small screen, and to Italian premieres from throughout the world.

The event will open with Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, preceded on January 22 by the pre-inaugural screening of Rob Marshall’s musical Nine, inspired by Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8½.

Europe is well represented, by Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet [trailer, film focus] – soon to be released in Italy by BIM, which is run by producer/distributor Valerio De Paolis, to whom the festival is dedicating a retrospective, with 26 titles from his library and a masterclass – and the directorial debut of Fanny Ardant, Ashes and Blood [trailer].

The latest in Italian production Italy is present with the premiere of Dodo Fiori’s La Strategia degli Affetti, but other titles could be selected once the Berlinale unveils its line-up.

For now, there are 15 Italian films, the best according to a committee of 11 film critics that were released or seen at major festivals over the course of 2009. They will be judged by an international jury presided over by German director Margarethe von Trotta. The selection, however, is not particularly courageous, and features the most prominent titles (including the masterly Vincere [trailer, film focus] by Marco Bellocchio and The Man Who Will Come [trailer, film focus] by Giorgio Diritti), overlooking original films worthy of inclusion.

The competition (to be judged by two popular juries) also includes shorts and documentaries, while the section Cinema Sul Cinema features documentaries on the great figures of Italian film history, such as Dino Risi (Fabrizio Corallo’s Una Bella Vacanza) and Ettore Scola (Jean Gili’s Scola le Satiriste).

Further tributes include to screenwriter Tonino Guerra, composer Armando Trovajoli (who will hold the closing night concert) and a triad of socio-political Italian cinema: Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi and Gian Maria Volonté.

(Translated from Italian)