2024 Italian Screens
Cinecube in Gwanghwamun, Seoul from the 15th to the 18th.
To be an educated person, you have to watch at least one Italian movie.
For film buffs, Italian films are neo-realism. If translated, it means new realism, but there is no old or new in realism. It’s all realism. However, what is important is what era the trend was popular in. Italian neorealism was popular in the 1940s and 1950s. As you might guess by looking at the era, these are films that contain reflections and reflections on World War II and the Italian fascism that played a devilish role in it.
The ideology of atonement must of course be realistic. Because we have to tell the truth. You need to be able to tell the truth about how people are living now. This is why many Italian neo-realism films were dark and poor (Vittorio de Sica’s ‘Bicycle Thieves’) and, unlike rich Hollywood films, had to be filmed technically rough (Roberto Rossellini’s ‘Defenseless City’). Otherwise, the main works were those that moved the realm of expression between the extremes of ideas (Federico Fellini’s ‘8 and 1/2’) and considered what role film art should play in reality. Neorealism has had a tremendous impact on world film history.
Anyway, it’s all old news. Now is the time to think about what the new trend, the new realism, will be in Italy in the 2020s. Many people will bring up Luca Guadagnino’s name. His ‘I Am Love’ and ‘Call Me by Your Name’ will be mentioned as his best works. Rather, some people say they can’t forget ‘Bones and All’, which depicts the story of a cannibalistic couple, and ‘Challengers’, a tennis movie with impressive threesome love between two men and Zendaya Coleman’s strong smashing, cannot be left out. But this director tends to move to Hollywood rather than Italy.
Among Italy’s current ‘crazy’ directors, there is also Paolo Sorrentino. ‘Great Beauty’, ‘Youth’, and ‘Hand of God’ are works that show that Sorrentino is rising to the rank of a master in a different way from Luca Guadagnino, but he also feels more like a pan-European director than an Italian one.
So who truly carries on the new lineage of Italian realism? In terms of purism, who are the real Italian contemporary film directors? There is a film screening that shows that point. This is ‘2024 Italian Screens’. Three of the latest Italian films and one classic will be screened. It will be held at Cinecube in Gwanghwamun, Seoul for four days from the 15th to the 18th.
At this screening, the names of three unfamiliar directors are introduced. They are Paola Cortelesi, Margherita Vicario, and Marco Bellocchio. On the other hand, the classic work is, of course, Federico Pelli’s 138-minute masterpiece ‘8 and 1/2’.
Female director Paola Cortelesi’s work ‘We Still Have Tomorrow’ is black and white. It looks like a direct descendant of 1940s neo-realism. The story depicts women’s struggle for suffrage set in the 1940s. It is a work that provides a look into one side of the turbulent history of the country of Italy.
Margherita Vicario’s movie ‘Gloria’ is a musical. The setting is a convent, and nuns are the characters in the play. It is set in the 1800s and depicts the duality of freedom and bondage in religion in Italian society in a relatively cheerful tone.
An unusual work is the film ‘Kidnapped’ by director Marco Bellocchio. This is a story about the Catholic Church kidnapping children. The story is set in 1858 and exposes the oppression and violence of Italian Catholicism and, above all, the hypocrisy of its theocratic political nature. On the one hand, it is a work that highlights the grandeur of the Catholic Church and the beauty of its style.
The 2024 Italian Screens is an event directly led by the Italian government. There is a desire to restore even a little of the glory that Italian films had in the past. It is led by the Directorate General of Film and Audiovisual under the Ministry of Culture, an Italian government department, and co-hosted by the Department of International Cooperation of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here, Cinecitta, a major studio in Italy, serves as a co-host. In Korea, it is an event jointly run by Il Media, an imported film company specializing in European art films.
Federico Fellini’s ‘8 1/2’ is a classic among classics and a masterpiece among masterpieces. This is a work starring Marcello Mastroianni, Italy’s Aran Delon and Italy’s Gregory Peck. These days, there are many people who claim to have seen a movie based on its title alone. If you are an Arte reader, you must see this movie ‘8 1/2’.
The screening schedule for the 2024 Italian Screens is as shown in the table below.
Oh Dong-jin, film critic
