Pass code: sharing. After the audiovisual home indigestion home, between sofa and PC, here’s Taormina with its three directors. Alessandra De Luca, Francesco Alò and Federico Pontiggia, well known journalists and critics but new faces (finally) on the national scene of festival directors. We met them to understand how went this first experience under the volcano, talking about selection, attendance and post-pandemic future perspectives.
“Selection was not difficult” says Alessandra De Luca journalist and moderator of Venice Film Festival’s press conferences “because there are many films waiting to be presented at festivals and to be released in theaters. We have seen 487 movies, we looked for some of them through the distributions and after a first screening we realized that films are not a problem for festivals, they arrive and are also of the highest quality ”.
What was the winning card of this edition?
“This year it was the desire to be together, we are realizing the enthusiasm of meeting, seeing and discussing films, doing all those things we took for granted and then realized are not obvious. The winning cards are diversity and sharing that seem trivial concepts but perhaps they are no longer and never will be again“.
“I believe that the watchword of a Festival that tries to get out of the pandemic is otherness, that means relying on one another to find out more on oneself” says Federico Pontiggia, journalist, TV presenter and critic “But we looked for otherness not only in foreign films but also in the Italian one such as Boys, Occhi Blu, La Terra dei Figli, A Classic Horror Story, Atlas, all different from each other. Each of them conveys an idea of cinema which is the idea of being together and this is Taormina this year “.
Sharing between Teatro Greco and indoor theater, how do you imagine next year?
“Next year will be a crazy hit” says Francesco Alò, critic and journalist “we will have to be even more physical, bring back the stars here, which is what we have been missing this year because of Covid, which involved us but much more great international productions that had issues bringing us great stars. Taormina deserves this, we know it very well, Teatro Greco is a star itself. Next year we must push harder and bring even more great cinema in this historic festival“.
