The Soundtrack Stars Award 2022 for best soundtrack among the films in the official selection of #venezia79 goes to Siccità by Paolo Virzì. The Jury of the Award decided the award, now in its tenth edition. It was presented yesterday to Maestro Franco Piersanti, author of the music for the film, produced by Wildside and Vision Distribution.
The film, we read in the motivations for the Award, gives the music an important role by making it the protagonist among the performers of a choral cast, in a counterpoint to the images and pages of the screenplay that from the first scene enters the film discreetly but with a role also ‘visible’ in the presence of an orchestra. And, as he says, Paolo Virzì, Mina’s song Mi sei scoppiato dentro al cuore, heard by cellist Filippo in the loneliness of mourning (and musically commenting on the cast’s final catwalk) resonates like a prayer in a landscape of loneliness and petty relationships, trying to give voice to the irrepressible collective desire for consolation and love.”
A special mention went to Rodrigo D’Erasmo for the original music in the documentary “Sergio Leone – The Italian Who Invented America,” written and directed by Francesco Zippel,a Sky Studios and Sky Italia production with Leone Film Group, a tribute to one of the great legends of world cinema, “in which,” stresses the Soundtrack Stars Award jury, “Maestro D’Erasmo was able to use in the story unreleased music and great classics from Ennio Morricone‘s repertoire, but also the play of noises that, in agreement with Leone the great Morricone himself had made protagonists, from the whistle to the squeak of a door, to the rhythm of that famous drop falling up on the flaps of a hat.
The Critics’ Award for the tenth anniversary of the Soundtrack Stars Award went to Stefano Bollani: “Composer, pianist and authentic wizard of jazz – is the motivation – Bollani is a unique performer endowed with the ability to transform creativity into empathy and notes into an emotional pentagram, uniting music to theatre and increasingly to cinema, in a journey capable of making us fly between fun and commitment, even through soundtracks, just like his fingers on the piano keys. In the ‘edition of the Soundtrack Stars Award 2022, which blows out ten candles this year, a Critics’ Award dedicated, therefore, to an artist of multifaceted talent, proclaimed by the magazine “Musica Jazz” in 1998 the best new talent and who over the years has seen his career range between different sectors of entertainment (from music to cinema, theatre to TV) and between different musical genres (from jazz to pop to classical music). Stefano Bollani is applauded worldwide and boasts collaborations with great orchestras and conductors, exceptional performers and unique inventions, such as the soundtrack to Carosello Carosone, awarded the Nastro D’Argento, and the music for the film Il Pataffio by Francesco Lagi.”
The 2022 Soundtrack Stars Award Jury is composed of Laura Delli Colli (President, representing SNGCI) and journalists Carola Carulli (Tg2), Elisabetta Esposito (Gazzetta dello Sport), Giuseppe Fantasia (Il Foglio), Lavinia Farnese (Cosmopolitan), Tiziana Leone (Ciak), Antonella Nesi (Adnkronos), Marina Sanna (Il Cinematografo), Stefania Ulivi (Corriere della Sera), and Alessandra Vitali (La Repubblica).
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Soundtrack Stars Award, Andrea Camporesi, founder of Free Event, which organizes and produces the award said, “Ten years is an important milestone but above all a great confirmation that we made the right choice to believe in the dream of conceiving and producing the Soundtrack Stars Award. To have made our small contribution to enhancing Music in Cinema and having done so in Venice at the longest-running Film Festival ever fills us with joy and motivation to continue this journey in the coming decades. I want to thank the Biennale, the SNGCI and its President, aura Delli Colli who, together with the journalists on the Jury, believed in the Award, making it unique and helping it grow year after year.”
“A Jury that I thank,” adds Laura Delli Colli, “having inherited its leadership after a first edition clamorously led by Giuliano Montaldo and Cesare Cremonini from Gianni Canova, because from the very first years it has been able to enhance the excellence of the masters and grasp, at the same time, the greatness and the in many cases absolutely special role of music in the most authorial cinema as in the most original films, awarding the soundtracks of the films of Emma Dante and Alejandro González Iñárritu as of the works of Guadagnino.
