A Russian Frankenstein conquers Lecce
Cinema on the Old Continent sometimes speaks in Russian and German. At the sixth "Festival of European Cinema" which just ended yesterday in Lecce, the big winners were My stepbrother Frankenstein by Valerji Todorovskij, from Odessa, and Fallen (Krisana) by the Berliner Fred Kelemen. The former won the Golden Olive Tree as Best Film and Best Script (Leonid Yarmolnik), and the Students’ Prize. Indeed the hundreds of high school students from Lecce who rushed to the festival just loved this free adaptation, this new contemporary version of Mary Shelley’s ‘monster’. This modern Frankenstein, a mutilated soldier with a soul as degraded as his body, tries in vain to enter the bourgeois spheres in Moscow, but the apparently open-minded intelligentia is not open enough to accept the differences of an odd one like him
Fallen (produced and sold abroad by Kino Kombat Filmproduction), a travel deep down the soul of a man who passively watched a woman commit suicide, got the prize as Best Picture, and the Fipresci prize of international critique. As for the actresses, they were two to win the competition ex-aequo: young Valentina Merizzi was distinguished for her role in Tu devi essere il lupo by Vittorio Moroni, and Eszter Bagameri got the award for Guarded secrets by Zsuzsa Boszormenyi (Hungary). One of the sponsors, the insurance Reale Mutua Assicurazioni, also elected a winner, Ruins by Janez Burger (Slovenia, 2004).
Amongst the other European films, out of competition, there were many Italian short films (made by the students at the Experimental Cinema Centre in Rome) and European ones (by the candidates for the Efa prize 2004) as well as the six episodes of Heimat 3, presented by the star-director Edgar Reitz and the actress Salome Kammer Reitz themselves. Celebrities were actually quite a few to come to Salento for the festival; amongst them, Virna Lisi —she was dedicated a retrospective and a photo exhibition— and the directors Gianluca Tavarelli, Edoardo Winspeare, and Krzysztof Zanussi who unexpectedly came from Poland in memory of good Karol Wojtyla, bringing his 1981 film on the Pope, Da un Paese Lontano.
(Translated from Italian)
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