18/04/2013 - Miele by Valeria Golino selected for the Un Certain Regard section. “Going to Cannes for the fifth time in a row is a responsibility and an honour,” Sorrentino declared

La grande bellezza [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paolo Sorrentino
film profile] by Paolo Sorrentino will be presented in the competition section at the Cannes Film Festival, while Miele [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Valeria Golino
interview: Valeria Golino
film profile] by Valeria Golino has been selected in the Un Certain Regard section (read the news story).

“I would like to thank the festival for the invitation and for the attention it has given my work since the beginning,” Paolo Sorrentino declared. “To be selected from thousands of films is already a great acknowledgement. Going for the fifth time in a row is a responsibility and an honour that I share with my entire team. Passionate men and women who have enabled me to make one of my dreams into a film.”  

Conceived and written by Sorrentino himself with Umberto Contarello, the film was entirely set and filmed in Rome.  

High society women, upstarts, politicians, high level criminals, journalists, actors, fallen aristocrats, artists and intellectuals – some fake, some real – presumed intertwined relationships and inconsistent rapports, a desperate Babylon which comes to life in buildings from the antiquity, gigantic villas, and the most beautiful terraces in the city. Everyone has been fitted in. And no one looks good. Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), 65, writer and journalist, broken and disenchanted, eyes permanently blurred over by gin and tonic, watches this procession of vacuous and dissatisfied humanity, as powerful as it is depressing. The weight of life, dressed up with speciousness, and distracted by entertainment. A vertiginous moral mellowness. And behind it all: Rome in the summer. Beautiful and indifferent. Like a dead diva.

La grande bellezza, which will come out on May 21, distributed by Medusa Film and contemporaneously coming out in France with Pathé, is an Italian French coproduction: Indigo Film with Medusa, in association with Banca Popolare di Vicenza for Italy, and Babe Films, Pathé and France 2 Cinéma for France. 

(Translated from Italian)