Italian Cinema Exposed Again at 2014 Open Roads Fest

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 02 June 2014 11:43

Written by Brad Balfour

Those Happy Years

Open Roads has served as the leading North American showcase of contemporary Italian cinema for the past 13 years. Organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center with Istituto Luce-Cinecittà-Filmitalia and in collaboration with New York’s Italian Cultural Institute — this diverse series takes place from June 6th - 12th, 2014. Screenings are scheduled at the Film Society's Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street).

This long running overview includes the latest work from established veterans (Gianni Amelio, Roberto Andò, Daniele Luchetti) and top award winners, as well as promising new talents from both the commercial and independent film world.

This year’s festival highlights the emergence of new works by Italian documentarians, and explores the trend towards rich and fascinating hybrids of documentaries and fiction, with more than a third of the films to be shown focused on the medium.

This year’s lineup explores the evolution of Italy’s political transformation spotlighted by the opening-night selection — Luchetti’s Those Happy Years. This charming, coming-of-age autobiographical tale tells of the director’s childhood as a budding filmmaker growing up in Rome during the 1970s — a particularly radical, transformative period in Italy. A revealing, sometimes humorous look at the period and its contradictions, this film highlights the past but looks at it with contemporary perspective.

Renowned TV host and political comedian Pierfrancesco Diliberto wrote, directed, and stars in The Mafia Only Kills in Summer, his feature debut. About a young boy and his obsession with the Mafia’s presence in his city, the film effectively blends and both an ironic and sentimental view of the past and Italy criminal class. The movie is alsostory of the boy’s obsession with a beautiful schoolmate who remains his love interest until adulthood. Set against a backdrop of some of Italy’s most tragic past criminal events, the film offers a striking look in the Italian mindset.

Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA -- the first documentary to win the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival — explores Rome’s 43.5-mile highway Grande Raccordo Anulare that encircles the city by focusing on absorbing, moving individual portraits that emerge from the areas drivers pass through but never see, to reveal a different side of the bustling city’s inhabitants. Though an interesting experiment, this sort-of travelogue is more visually compelling than narratively coherent.

Other documentaries include Vincenzo Marra’s Naples-set The Administrator, which looks at a building administrator’s dealings with his larger-than-life tenants, providing a tough-minded yet affectionate portrait of an Italy mired in crisis. Gianni Amelio’s Happy to Be Different is a moving, enlightening work of oral history of gay life in Italy from the fall of Fascism through the early 1980s.

Alberto Fasulo’s docudrama debut Tir won the top prize at the Rome Film Festival and follows a former teacher from Bosnia who takes a job driving a tractor trailer (“tir”) through Europe. Combining professional actors and real truck drivers, Fasulo has created a striking film about what life is really like on the road—one that simulates a documentary.

Politics and social issues facing Italians also play a role in Gianni Amelio’s A Lonely Hero, starring comedian and actor Antonio Albanese, whose character learns to reinvent and adapt himself to any job as a professional substitute (train conductor, fishmonger, tailor, etc.), as a result of the country’s unstable unemployment crisis.

Roberto Andò’s Long Live Freedom is a scathing critique of Italian political dynamics and stars Toni Servillo as a seasoned politician navigating the decline of his party by fleeing to Paris and hiding out at the home of his ex-girlfriend.

Edoardo Winspeare’s Quiet Bliss follows three generations of women who seek refuge in their family’s olive grove after their small textile business collapses and their efforts to revive their lives in the wake of economic catastrophe and the recession.

Giovanni Veronesi’s The Fifth Wheel is a humorous tale that takes audiences on a journey of a half-century of pivotal political events through the eyes of actor and screenwriter Ernesto Fioretti.

During the initial weekend there will be in-person appearances of directors, actors and producers at many of the screenings.

For more information, go to: filmlinc.com/openroads.

Open Roads: New Italian Cinema
June 6th - 12th, 2014

Film Society of Lincoln Center

Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St.
(Btwn Broadway & Amsterdam Av.)
New York, NY 10023

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