Made In Italy | Dog and Wolf

A showcase of the best of contemporary Italian cinema, Cinema Made In Italy offers a grand tour of the bel paese.

Italian Landscapes

by Laura Bennett

Now an annual event, it screens ten recent Italian films followed more often than not by Q&A sessions with the directors or actors. This year’s edition will open with Ermanno Olmi’s monochrome First World War portrait of life in the trenches, Greenery Will Bloom Again (Torneranno I Prati), which featured in this year’s Berlinale. From the snowy trenches to the glacial peaks of The Ice Forest (La Foresta di Ghiaccio), Claudio Noce’s equally black and white thriller set in the spectacular Julian Alps in Italy’s far north east touches on issues of revenge and human trafficking. At the other end of the country, Pierfrancesco Diliberto’s The Mafia Kills Only in Summer (La Mafia Uccide Solo d’Estate), winner of Best Comedy at the European Film Awards, examines the bloody Mafia war that tore Palermo apart during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s through the eyes of a budding teenage journalist. Providing a snapshot of an urban landscape, Gianni di Gregorio’s Good for Nothing (Buoni a Nulla), set in Rome, is a comedy that follows the director in the lead role as he takes control of his own destiny. The Lack, by the video-artist duo known as Masbedo, takes a conceptual look at the theme of absence through the eyes of six female characters in primitive natural settings. Other films to be showcased are 9×10 Novanta, a collection of nine short films by some of Italy’s most acclaimed emerging filmmakers (including Marco Bonfanti, Claudio Giovannesi, Alina Marazzi, Pietro Marcello, Roland Sejko, Giovanni Piperno, Costanza Quatriglio, Paola Randi, Alice Rohrwacher, Sara Fgaier); Bonifacio Angius’ Perfidia, a father and son drama; Edoardo Winspeare’s Quiet Bliss (In Grazia di Dio), focusing on a group of Puglian women faced by the financial crisis; Sebastiano Riso’s Darker than Midnight (Più Buio di Mezzanotte), a Sicilian coming-of-age story about fourteen-year-old Davide; and Roan Johnson’s So Far So Good (Fino a Qui Tutto Bene), centred around the final weekend spent together by five friends before they are forced to go their separate ways.