Italian documentaries showcased in London
The Cinecittà festival takes place at the Curzon Blooomsbury on 4-5 July
This weekend, Saturday July 4th and Sunday 5th sees the 5th Cinecittà Italian Doc Season at the Bertha DocHouse screen of Curzon Bloomsbury, showcasing three remarkable films on highly emotive subjects with a formal originality which explores the limits of documentary cinema itself.
In Storie per Sandro, Giacomo Boeri treats his father’s advancing dementia with great sympathy and imagination. In consultation with his sister and mother, and realising he may not be able to restore his father’s memories, he seeks rather to evoke the emotions of those memories by staging the events in a film studio, ranging from a childhood fishing trip to a violent student demonstration in Milan.
At the far end of the country, in Calabria, a very different drama plays out in Il quieto vivere where Gianluca Matarese observes and to an extent stages the hysterical soap opera feud between a village diva and her brother’s wife in all its ranting paranoid grandstanding glory, while a tragicomic chorus of aunts tries in vain to mediate between them. It always pays to watch a film’s credits to the end as this one concludes: “Nessun parente è stato maltratto durante le riprese”.
Finally the magnificent Roberto Rossellini, piu di una vita, worthy winner of this year’s David di Donatello award for best documentary, which using archive film and photographs recounts the less well-known but more interesting last twenty years of his career from the end of his marriage to Ingrid Bergman and their last film together, his comeback documentary in India and his Indian wife Sonali, and then pioneering to the end, his radical and educational documentaries for television, with remarkable clips of his interview with Salvador Allende and an unfinished science series.
The film will be shown with a very rare screening of his first documentary short Fantasia sottomarina from 1940 where a cute little fish flees the dangers of the deep: Nemo-realism!