The
ANNOTICO Report
Venice has held sway for Film Festivals in Italy (in the
summer) since the 1930s.
It
seems bizarre that the city of Federico
Fellini's La Dolce Vita, William Wyler's Roman Holiday and the Cinecitta film
studios is not part of the international film festival circuit.
The
new Rome
festival (in October) coincides with a revival at Cinecitta,
the sprawling film studio on Via Tuscolana in the
Roman suburbs. In its glory days in the 1950s and 1960s Cinecitta
became known as Hollywood on the Tiber, producing epics such as Ben-Hur
and Cleopatra, as well as Italian cinema classics by Fellini, Vittorio De Sica and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Partly because of
Italian bureaucracy and tax laws, Cinecitta was
reduced to spaghetti westerns and soap operas. The tax climate has changed,
however, and the turnaround began five years ago when Martin Scorsese
re-created 19th-century Manhattan
at Cinecitta for Gangs of New York.
As a result, Cinecitta -- where the Rome festival's closing bash will be held --
is undergoing a renaissance. This coincides with a renaissance in Italian film
itself, with directors such as Marco Bellocchio,
Gianni Amelio, Cristina Comencini
and the Turkish-born Ferzan Ozpetek.
ROMAN
RENAISSANCE
Venice
may not like it , but film is returning to Italy's
capital
WHEN people meet
Giorgio Gosetti, the director of the new Rome film festival, their
reaction tends to be: "You mean there isn't one already?" It does
seem bizarre that the city of Federico
Fellini's La Dolce Vita, William Wyler's Roman Holiday and the Cinecitta film
studios is not part of the international film festival circuit. The main
reason, of course, is Venice,
which has held sway since the 1930s.
But
next month RomeFilmFest will change all that, and Venice officials,
according to film-world gossip, are furious. Rome
is entering the fray just when Venice
is fighting back against allegations it has become stale.
The danger for Venice is that the centre of gravity -- and the glitz and
glamour -- will shift south to the Italian capital, which has held an
international film festival just once, in 1946, before ceding to Venice when the lagoon
city festival was revived after World War II. Sixty years on, the mood has
changed, and this time Rome
means business.
RomeFilmFest is the brainchild of
Walter Veltroni, the go-ahead leftwing mayor of Rome,
who is a film buff with strong links to the US, and Goffredo
Bettini, the head of Musica per Roma, which runs the
Rome Auditorium, the new ultra-modern arts complex designed by Renzo Piano.
Films will
premiere at the auditorium's three turtle-backed concert halls and will then be
shown in Rome
cinemas. Tensions were high in the run-up to Venice, with intense behind-the-scenes
rivalry to secure new movies.
Gosetti is cagey about Rome's
line-up but indications are that the Rome festival will show Steven Shainberg's Fur, featuring Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus; Giuseppe Tornatore's La Sconosciuta; Martin Scorsese's The
Departed, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson
and Matt Damon; Ridley Scott's A Good Year, starring Russell Crowe as a
financier who retreats to Provence; Mira Nair's The Namesake; and Paolo Virzi's N, about Napoleon, with Monica Bellucci
and Daniel Auteuil.
Some in the film
world find this cut-throat competition alarming. The Italian director Lina Wertmuller says she has faith in Veltroni
but is worried. "We already face stiff competition from the French, and
now we are competing with each other."
The Italian
newspaper Liberazione declared bluntly: "Rome invests millions to destroy Venice",
noting that Venice was having trouble raising
the E100million ($A167million) to pay for its new iceberg-shaped Palace of Cinema. Davide
Croff, the president of the Venice Biennale, accuses Rome of
"cannibalism". There is even -- as often in Italy -- a political edge: Marco Muller, the
director of the Venice
festival, was appointed by the former centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi, whereas Veltroni
is a leader of the centre left.
Alarm bells
clanged in Venice when Veltroni announced that he had
agreed with "my good friend Bob De Niro"
that Rome would showcase the best of the 2006 offerings from De Niro's Tribeca Festival in New
York. Rome,
said Peter Scarlett, director of Tribeca, was "a
great city which has somehow never presented a film festival on the scale of
other cities of its size". In other words, it was about time.
On the surface,
the sparring is giving way to a show of co-operation, with Croff
declaring that the two festivals have "completely different profiles ... I
am a manager with a background in finance and I know that competition can be a
good thing". Venice,
Croff says, has tradition behind it as "the
mother of all film festivals".
Gosetti, who is Venetian himself
and formerly helped to run the Venice festival, agrees that in the end for
Italy to boast two big film festivals "can only benefit cinema in general
and the Italian film industry in particular ... Davide
Croff at first said to me he would like to kill me.
But then he said: 'Well, since I can't kill you, I guess we'd better work
together'."
Gosetti and Mario Sesti, his right-hand man in Rome,
also believe the arrival of the Rome
film festival will give a shot in the arm to Italian cinema, which has been in
the doldrums since its golden age 40 years ago. The festival coincides with a
revival at Cinecitta, the sprawling film studio on
Via Tuscolana in the Roman suburbs. In its glory days
in the 1950s and 1960s Cinecitta became known as Hollywood on the Tiber,
producing epics such as Ben-Hur and Cleopatra, as
well as Italian cinema classics by Fellini, Vittorio
De Sica and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Partly because of
Italian bureaucracy and tax laws, Cinecitta was
reduced to spaghetti westerns and soap operas. The tax climate has changed,
however, and the turnaround began five years ago when Martin Scorsese
re-created 19th-century Manhattan
at Cinecitta for Gangs of New York.
As a result, Cinecitta -- where the Rome festival's closing bash will be held --
is undergoing a renaissance. This coincides with a renaissance in Italian film
itself, with directors such as Marco Bellocchio,
Gianni Amelio, Cristina Comencini
and the Turkish-born Ferzan Ozpetek.
The problem, Gosetti points out, is to ensure the new wave of Italian
films is properly marketed and reaches a global audience. "After the
demise of the Milan film fair, the field has
been left to the Americans, especially the American Film Market in Santa Monica," he
says. "But with Rome in October now
following Venice in the summer, the centre of
gravity will shift to Italy,
and Europe."
The Rome
masterstroke is probably the "people's jury": for the first time the
awards will be made not by film professionals but by what Gosetti
calls "the film-going public, people who love films but may never have set
foot in a filmfestival".
The Times
RomeFilmFest runs from October 13 to
21. Details at www.romacinemafest.org.