Skip to main content

Italian Films at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival

Update May 19, 2018

 Two Italian filmmakers were awarded prizes at Cannes -
Best Screenplay went to Alice Rohrwacher for Lazzaro Felice..
Best Actor went to Marcello Fonte for his role in Matteo Garrone’s Dogman
&
Gianni Zanasi's comedy Lucia’s Grace was named Best European Film in the Directors’ Fortnight
Stefano Savona's Samouni Road won the L'Oeil d'or for Best Documentary given by the French Society of Multimedia Authors (Scam)

Congratulations!


Original Post

Five Italian films made the official program of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival plus one in the Directors' Fortnight category. They are:


AS IT IS ON EARTH by Pier Lorenzo Pisano: Cinéfondation Selection


The village was small, and now it's even smaller; only four houses still standing and a street. There is no one around. Nobody to say "hi" to, no one to whine about the heat to. The earthquake didn't even spare the sound of breathing. The story of two souls trying to mend a wound in a torn town.

DOGMAN by Matteo Garrone: En Competition


DOGMAN is the name of a pet grooming shop and also the tragic prediction of the main character’s metamorphosis from man to animal. Based on a true story that took place 30 years ago and of which nobody will ever know the truth, DOGMAN digs deep into the human dilemmas of the violence hidden inside each one of us.


EUPHORIA by Valeria Golino: Un Certain Regard


The film revolves around two distant brothers, forced together by life events. Matteo (Scamarcio) is a young successful entrepreneur who is open-minded, charming and dynamic. His brother Ettore (Mastandrea) still lives in the small provincial town where they were born, teaching at the local middle school. He is a fairly cautious and honest man, who has always stayed out of the spotlight out of fear of making mistakes. They are two apparently very distant people. However, a difficult situation results in the two brothers being given the opportunity to get to know each other, and they soon discover that they have a surprisingly close bond in a vortex of fragility and tenderness, fear and euphoria

LAZZARO FELICE (MY BITTER LAND) by Alice Rohrwacher: En Competition


The adventures of a man living on the margins of his society who can seemingly travel through time.


PAPA FRANCESCO – UN UOMO LA SUA PAROLA (POPE FRANCIS - A MAN OF HIS WORD) by Wim Wenders: Séances Spéciales


The film is only the second co-production that the Vatican has made with outside filmmakers and the first in which a Pope addresses the audience directly, discussing topics such as ecology, immigration, consumerism, and social justice.

Pope Francis – A MAN OF HIS WORD is a significant nonfiction film, as it is not a biography about the Pope, rather a film with him.

On March 13th, 2013, the Cardinal of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, became the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church. As Pope Francis, he has made communication a vital element of the Church and a key component of his remarkable work of reform.
In Pope Francis – A MAN OF HIS WORD, he responds to questions submitted from around the globe. Exclusive footage from the Vatican’s archive shows the Pope on journeys, sharing his ideas and ideals in different parts of the world.

TROPPA GRAZIA (LUCIA'S GRACE) by Gianni Zanasi: Quinzaine des Réalisateurs - Film de clôture


Single working mother Lucia (Alba Rohrwacher) is trying to find the right balance between life with her teenage daughter, a complicated romance and her career as a land surveyor. Lucia’s future is jeapordized when she realizes that an ambitious new building is environmentally dangerous due to the city council’s inaccurate maps. Lucia is torn by her decision to keep her mouth shut for fear of losing her job. A mysterious foreign woman tries to convince Lucia to stand up to her superiors and recommend a church as the only solution for the troubled building site. Lucia’s belief in miracles will soon be put to the test.

SAMOUNI ROAD by Stefano Savona: Quinzaine des Réalisateurs


In the rural outskirts of Gaza City, the Samouni extended family, a small community of farmers, is about to celebrate a wedding. It’s going to be the first celebration since the last war. Amal, Fuad, their brothers and their cousins have lost their parents, their houses and their olive trees. The neighborhood where they live is being rebuilt. As they replant trees and plow fields, they face their most difficult task: piecing together their own memory. Through these young survivors’ recollections, Samouni Road conveys a deep, multifaceted portrait of a family before, during and after the tragic event that changed its life forever.

Newly announced films include...
THE FIGHT by Marco Bellocchio: Quinzaine des Réalisateurs - Courts métrages
EVERYBODY KNOWS by Asghar Farhadi: En Competition, Film d'overture
IN MY ROOM by Ulrich Köhler: Un Certain Regard
THE BICYCLE THIEF by Vittorio De Sica: Cannes Classics

Movie descriptions were provided by Filmitalia. The 2018 Cannes Film Festival will be held May 8 - 19. Click here for more information.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

7 Days - 7 Women: Interview with Actress Sabrina Impacciatore

  Photo by Rossella Vetrano On Day 6 of our series, 7 Days - 7 Women, in which we are profiling seven strong, talented women working as filmmakers, writers or visual artists, we talk with actress Sabrina Impacciatore about the diversity of her roles. Whether she's playing a devoted mother trying to protect her child, Jesus Christ's "Veronica" in Mel Gibson's controversial film, "Passion of the Christ" or a young woman coming of age, Impacciatore escapes into the life and mind of each character she takes on, sometimes so deeply that she believes she is actually them.   It's a fine line between reality and fiction, but she treads it carefully and anyone watching her performance benefits from her emotional connection to the character that she becomes. I spoke with Impacciatore at the 2010 Open Roads: New Italian Film series in New York City. We talked about her lifelong dream of becoming an actress. She also gave me some insight into the diff
Post a Comment
Read more

A Conversation with Taylor Taglianetti, Founder of NOIAFT

A new platform has recently been launched that promotes the work of Italian Americans in film and television. The brains behind the initiative is a young, passionate woman who is taking the support that she received early on in her journey and paying it forward. With origins in Basilicata and  Campania , Taylor Taglianetti is a proud Italian American from Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a senior at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in January 2020. She is majoring in Film and Television and minoring in the Business of Entertainment, Media and Technology.  Taglianetti  aspires to be a feature film producer and bring great stories to the big screen. In addition to running NOIAFT, she is currently a Development Intern with Silver Pictures, the production company that produced the Lethal Weapon and The Matrix series. Last summer, she was a development intern with Maven Pictures, the Academy-Award winning production company behind Still Alice and The Kids Are All Right . 
Post a Comment
Read more

A Conversation With the Man Who Played Pasolini's Christ

There have been countless cinematic interpretations of the books of the Bible, but few have stood the test of time. One that qualifies as a classic is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 “Il Vangolo secondo Matteo” (The Gospel According to St. Matthew). Considered by the Vatican to be among the best film adaptations of one of the Gospels, Pasolini’s 1964 film was shot in the regions of Calabria, Puglia and Basilicata. In an interview with RAI television while on location in Matera, Pasolini talked about the reasons for shooting there. “I chose two or three places in Basilicata. One is Barile, a town of Albanians. I needed a place for Bethlehem. Another location is Matera because it reminded me of Jerusalem,” he explained. Pasolini’s interpretation of St. Matthews’s Gospel is pure, with no added commentary. He said that he followed the Gospel word for word without adding a single syllable. He explained in the interview that his idea to make the film happened by coincidence. “In October of 19
Post a Comment
Read more

Anna Foglietta: Actress and Activist with Old School Elegance

One look at actress Anna Foglietta in her any of her roles, and the Golden Age of Italian cinema comes to mind. Among Italy’s most sought-after actresses today, Foglietta brings to the table a classic eloquence of yesterday while representing Italy’s modern woman. Born in Rome in 1979, Foglietta began her career in 2005 with a role in the RAI television series La squadra . Her character Agent Anna De Luca had a two-year run on the series as she was transitioning to cinema with Paolo Virzì’s 2006 ensemble project 4-4-2- Il gioco più bello del mondo . Since then, she has become one of Italy’s most diverse actresses, transforming herself into interesting, layered characters for comedies and dramas alike. Aside from a small part in Anton Corbijn’s 2010 film The American starring George Clooney, Foglietta’s work began reaching mainstream American audiences in 2015. As Elisa in Edoardo Leo’s 2015 comedy Noi e la Giulia , Foglietta showed her funny side playing a goofball pregn
Post a Comment
Read more

Michelangelo Frammartino's "Il buco" — Unearthing our past

When a team of speleologists descended 700 meters into the Bifurto Abyss in Cosenza, Calabria, in 1961, they discovered that the underground caverns were the third deepest in the world and the deepest in Europe. Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino retraces that mission six decades later with a cast of locals and their livestock in his latest documentary, “Il buco” (“The Hole”). Inspiration for the film came while he was on location shooting his 2007 documentary, “Le quattro volte” (“Four Times”). Officials in the Pollino mountains, which stretch between Calabria and Basilicata, showed him what appeared to be just another sinkhole. Frammartino failed to understand their enthusiasm until they tossed a large stone into the void. It disappeared without making a sound. He was so overcome by the experience and the eerie landscape, he was haunted for years, compelling him to make his current film, one of many rooted in nature. “I was born in Milan, but my family is from Calabria. My pa
Post a Comment
Read more