06/02/2013 - The director, now festival head, wants to create an accessible event for web users. An international film personality also set to be Guest Director

Presenting to the press, the newly appointed head of the Turin Film Festival and film director Paolo Virzì, described changes he will be bringing to a newly “warm and welcoming festival, substantially unaltered in terms of its identity, which, in the space of nine days, will try to create the utopia of a cinema without borders, where performance and popular entertainment cohabit with auteurs’ paths, documentaries and experimental cinema. But it will also be a 2.0 festival, permanently connected and accessible to web users.”    

The retrospective dedicated to New Hollywood, which will be curated by Emanuela Martini, will present, over the course of two festival editions, around eighty American films made between 1967 and 1976. The Sons and Lovers section will be replaced by a brief cycle of Italian films from the last twenty years, each followed by gatherings including authors, historians, journalists and directors who will reflect on Italy’s culture, way of life and contemporary history. In a similar spirit of Italian cinema analysis and value creation, a second retrospective has been imagined, highlighting one modern Italian filmmaker.

Just like the Telluride Festival, every year will see the nomination of a new Guest Director, an international cinema star, who will be personally put in charge of a specific section. Rumours of further collaboration with Turin University’s Dams, the experimental centre for cinema in Rome and the Stabile theatre in Turin are already circulating.

Paolo Virzì added that “in order for the festival to truly be a celebration, we have on the one hand been thinking of re-launching the Public’s Prize, in which audiences would be invited to vote on the festival’s films, and on the other, we are looking into how we can give an affectionate emphasis to the moment in which guests enter the room.”  

(Translated from Italian)