Italian Cinema Today

A recently recovered film treasure will make its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival next week.  “Pier Paolo Pasolini – Agnès Varda – New York – 1967” is a short documentary shot with 16 mm color film by the French director Agnès Varda in New York City. The two were in town for the 4th edition of the New York Film Festival. The footage shows Pasolini walking around Times Square narrated by a Q&A voiceover between the two discussing filmmaking, Christianity and life.    The clarity is stunning for a film made more than 50 years ago. The footage was discovered in 2021, two years after Varda’s death, and restored by Cine-Tamaris, in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata.   The film will precede screenings of Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera” and other NYFF61 Main Slate selections, including Pictures of Ghosts, and Revivals selection Return to Reason: Short Films by Man Ray.   Click here for the complete lineup and schedule.

The extraordinary documentary shorts made by Italian director Vittorio De Seta in the fifties stand alone from the films of his contemporaries for the rigor of their observational eye. Shot in locations around Sicily, Sardinia, and Calabria, these vivid, colorful, narration-free nonfiction works alight on the daily labors and traditional customs of rural workers and their families, bringing out their rituals with such focused determination that they become almost dreamlike. Watching these films together creates a mesmeric immersion into a time, place, and cinema itself. Titles include  Lu tempu di li pisci spata  (1954),  Isole di fuoco  (1954),  Pasqua in Sicilia  (1955),  Surfarara  (1955),  Contadini del mare  (1955),  Parabola d’oro  (1955),  Un giorno in Barbagia  (1958),  Pescherecci  (1958),  Pastori di orgosolo  (1958), and  I dimenticati  (1959). Restored by the Cinetec...