Italian Cinema Today

Photo: Fabio Lovino/HBO She became an international overnight sensation for her role in the HBO hit series “The White Lotus,” but she’s no stranger to Italian moviegoers. Born in Naples in 1994, Simona Tabasco started acting when she was just 8 years old. Her craft is second nature to her now, but acting didn’t always come easily. In an interview with Forbes, she explained, “The spark that started my acting career didn’t happen right away when I started acting, but it broke out during the last 10 years.” Her first feature film role came around that time in Edoardo De Angelis’ 2014 crime drama “Perez,” for which she received the Nastri d’Argento Premio Biraghi, an award designated for young artists. In it, Tabasco portrays Tea Perez, the daughter of a famous Neapolitan criminal lawyer, played by Luca Zingaretti . When she falls in love with the son of a Camorra boss, her father must walk a fine line between his professional ethics and his love for his daughter. Tabasco brought depth an...

Whether she’s playing a devoted mother, a biblical figure or a tough but kind hotel manager, Sabrina Impacciatore escapes into the lives and minds of her characters so completely that she often believes she has become them. Impacciatore had wanted to be an actor since she was just 4 years old, but she grew up insecure about her looks and abilities so she pursued a degree in marketing and advertising instead. Unable to shake her childhood dream, she took up acting as a hobby, which led her to write for television. When she presented one of her scripts, she was asked to audition for it. Setting aside her fears, she gave it a shot, landing that role and many others to follow. Her sense of humor made her a natural for TV comedies. Legendary director Ettore Scola cast her in her first feature film, opposite Gérard Depardieu, in the 2000 drama “Concorrenza sleale” (Unfair Competition). Her emotionally charged breakout performance came a year later as Livia in Gabriele Muccino’s internationa...

Before #womeninfilm was a hashtag, I was talking with Italian actresses and women directors about their plight in the male dominated film industry. With all this week's news about Italian filmmakers like Asia Argento speaking at the Women in the World Summit in New York and the films of Valeria Gollino and Alice Rohrwacher making the official program of the Cannes Film Festival, I'd like to revisit a few of my past conversations with women filmmakers to look at how the conditions and opportunities have improved and what still needs to be done for women in Italy's film industry. T here's no better way than hearing directly from the women in the trenches, so  I've extracted these quotes from my interviews. Notice how grave the outlook was in 2005 and how it improved through the years with 2017 being the most positive. Actress Valentina Cervi New York City, 2005 Open Roads: New Italian Cinema “I think that cinema in general is going through a hard time b...

Claudio Santamaria and his wife author/journalist Francesca Barra in Rome A recent New York Times Magazine article stated the actors belonging to the new concept of a character actor are, instead of playing types, hired for “their ability to play no type at all, to disappear into roles completely while at the same time imbuing their performances with something memorable; they are chameleons in the truest sense of that word.” This description certainly applies to Claudio Santamaria. Born in Rome in 1974, Santamaria began his acting career in 1997, quickly making a name for himself while working with the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci, Bud Spencer and Monica Bellucci. In 2001, he emerged as a major force in contemporary Italian cinema with his performance  in Gabriele Muccino’s record-breaking "l'ultimo bacio"  (The Last Kiss). As Paolo, brash Gen Xer forced to come to terms with getting older, being responsible and letting go of a lost love, he plays the leader o...

  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...