Nine days dedicated “to all things cinema”, involving upwards of 150 screenings, 30 close encounters with special guests and 5 competitions feeding into the Vesuvio Awards, not to mention a raft of other prizes geared towards ensuring greater visibility for first and second works... The 21st edition of the Napoli Film Festival kicks off today, 23 September, based this year at the Institut Français Napoli, with events also unspooling at the Instituto Cervantes, the Goethe-Institut Neapel and the Castel dell’Ovo.

Until 1 October, the Neapolitan event directed by Mario Violini will play host to huge guests along the lines of Pupi Avati and Gianni Amelio, who will be handed the Lifetime Achievement Award; French director Benoît Jacquot, whose most recent film on Giacomo Casanova, Casanova, Last Love [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film], is opening the festival; Toni Servillo (attending on behalf of 5 Is The Perfect Number [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Igort
fiche film], a work recently presented at Venice’s Giornate degli Autori event), Valeria Golino (who stars in the cast of Igort’s film, as well as Jacquot’s, where she plays the first woman seduced by Casanova) and Lunetta Savino (the protagonist of Katja Colja’s Rosa [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film]). The festival also boasts, among other guest-based events, an encounter with filmmaker Gianfranco Pannone on the occasion of the screening of his new documentary film Scherza con i fanti [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
interview : Gianfranco Pannone, Ambrog…
fiche film] which he co-directed alongside Ambrogio Sparagna, and a similar meeting with actress Angela Fontana to coincide with the Campania premiere of Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli’s Likemeback [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film].

For their part, new European authors will be battling it out in the Europe/Mediterranean section, which is set to feature two world premieres: that of Denmark, by British director Adrian Shergold (a bittersweet comedy about an unlucky, unemployed man who tries to get himself arrested while travelling through Europe in order to have a bed to sleep in), and Italian work Mai per sempre [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film] by Fabio Massa (a dramatic story focusing on friendship, love and an inner struggle between good and bad). Other titles hail from Croatia (Aleksi [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film] by Barbara Vekaric, about a girl who tries to escape from the boring life her family have thrust upon her), Germany (the thriller A Clear Felling by Max Glescinski, the story of two friends who meet up after a twenty year hiatus in an attempt to face up to some bitter truths) and Morocco (The Healer by Mohamed Zineddaine, set in the outskirts of Khouribga, a city located close by to a phosphate mine).

Meanwhile, among the various “authors’ journeys” featured in the “Percorsi d’autore” section of the festival will be a retrospective of Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s first four films. Other showcases include a tribute to German cinema intitled “Focus 1989-2019: The Fall of the Berlin Wall” where films never before shown in Italy will be screened to mark 30 years since the unfolding of this historic event. Another key anniversary is set to be celebrated in the showcase “Autour 1959... la Nouvelle Vague”, which explores authors ranging from Godard through to Truffaut, sixty years on from the birth of the innovative French film movement. Last but not least, there will also be a section dedicated to Spanish cinema in which a number of first works are set to be screened, including the premiere of Thirty Souls [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Diana Toucedo
fiche film] by Diana Toucedo, which is due to close the festival.