The great chance for Italian Cinema

The Venice Film Festival is the Italian film industry’s most crucial moment of the year. This 80th edition, kicking off today, accomplice also to some defections due to the Hollywood actors’ and screenwriters’ strike, offers us an unprecedented opportunity: our directors have six titles in competition in the official selection, which has never happened recently. And directing them, often with big budgets and an international cast, is a team (all male, to be honest) of five great auteurs – Matteo Garrone, Saverio Costanzo, Stefano Sollima, Edoardo De Angelis, Giorgio Diritti – and one under 35 years with a bright future, Pietro Castellitto. They bring very different films that raise high expectations in those who love Italian stories and hope to see them rewarded. Our film business would deserve it to strengthen the slow post-COVID recovery. Two titles star Pierfrancesco Favino three years after his Coppa Volpi for Padrenostro. He will be the star of the opening, in that Comandante in which De Angelis recounts a little-known story of World War II and the clash of mentalities in Italy during those dramatic years. Garrone’s Io Capitano makes us experience the hallucinating journey of Seydou and Moussa from Senegal to the Italian coast. Diritti’s Lubo talks about street art and the blind violence of Nazism. Sollima goes beyond the genre in Adagio, suspended between suburban thrillers and balance sheets of wasted lives. Costanzo in Finalmente l’alba revisits our ’50s, between glittering hopes and the shadows of vice offered by the incoming economic prosperity. Castellitto Jr. in Enea mixes comedy and drama in a contemporary tale. Many films out of competition or from other sections also speak Italian, such as Felicità and Con la grazia di un Dio, directorial debuts for Micaela Ramazzotti and Alessandro Roia. L’ordine del tempo gives us back the very young 90-year-old Liliana Cavani. Giorgio Verdelli’s new, tiny miracle Vengo anch’io wraps us in the mocking and irresistible art of Enzo Jannacci. None of them will easily emerge: Venice 80, strikes or not, offers the usual, worldwide vibrant array of great films and directors typical of the Barbera Era. But the opportunity is there. Let’s try to seize it.