Teodora celebrates seven years and holding steady

by Camillo de Marco

27/03/2007 - Teodora Film is celebrating seven years of distribution activity with the April 13 release of Manslaughter(Drabet) [trailer] by Danish director Per Fly. After The Bench (2000) and The Inheritance (2003), the film concludes the filmmaker’s trilogy on Denmark’s social classes.

Produced by Ib Tardini for Zentropa Entertainment (with Spillekompagniet 41/2/Memfis Film International AB/Manslaughter Ltd./Sigma Films III Ltd) and sold by Trust Film Sales, Manslaughter was Denmark’s third biggest grossing film at the domestic box office in 2005, with nearly 400,000 admissions, and won the country’s 2006 Critics Prize.

"If Teodora Film didn’t exist, would a film like Manslaughter be released in Italy?" asked a confrontational Cesare Petrillo, co-founder of the company with Vieri Razzini. Founded in the spirit of discovery and diffusion, Teodora has distributed 27 quality films in seven years but is under threat by a market that pays little attention to less commercial themes.

“We find ourselves facing a cinema that is 90% Playstation,” continued Petrillo, made of spectators who grew up with the Berlusconis of the entire world. Children who in front of commercial television suffered numerous ischemias in their little brains, having gotten used to commercial interruptions from the onset. Fellini spoke of attention ischemias when the Mediaset networks sprung up in Italy. Along with the Berlusconis arrived the Murdochs and Mediaset was joined by the SKY monopoly, a new monster that takes away spectators and money from the cinema and imposes new shit on this poor country ".

Petrillo ended with three praiseworthy questions: "Will we be around in seven years to distribute Lucrecia Martel, Susanne Bier and Per Fly? Will these filmmakers be a part of the history of the art of cinema? Are we ready to fight together - distributors, producers, artists, intellectuals and journalists?"

(Translated from Italian)