31/03/2009

Actor Elio Germano will be the guest of honour at the second edition of the 8 1/2 Festa do Cinema Italiano, a non-competitive festival aiming to promote Italian cinema in Portugal. The cities of Lisbon and Porto will host the event from April 2-9.

Germano, who was Italy's Shooting Star of 2008, will present two of his recent films, not yet released locally: Daniele Vicari’s The Past is a Foreign Land [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (opening film) and Tutta la vita davanti [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Paolo Virzì.

Organised by the Lisbon-based association Il Sorpasso, in co-production with Trieste's La Capella Underground, the event will also host screenwriter-director Gianni di Gregorio, whose film 2008 Venice fest title Mid-August Lunch [+see also:
trailer
film profile] has been picked up for local distribution by Atalanta Filmes.

The programme also includes Alina Marazzi's documentaries We Want Roses Too [+see also:
trailer
film profile], about the Italian feminist movement, and For One More Hour with You, an autobiographical work about her mother’s suicide; while Davide Manuli will introduce his film Beket [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

In parallel, the Portuguese Film Museum will host a retrospective of Sardinian cinema and FNAC a series of classic titles that includes Antonioni's The Night, Fellini's Casanova, Visconti's Death in Venice and Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew.