Isole

Starting August 1st, the Casa del Cinema offers its viewers Isole (Islands), a “journey” to some of the most beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, with a selection of nine films set in Procida, Capri, Ventotene, Lampedusa, and the Aeolian Islands.

The film cycle opens on Friday, August 1st, with Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (The Contempt), which sets his film at Villa Malaparte, a building overlooking the sea in Capri, in a perfect blend of technological modernity and timeless natural atmospheres. Tuesday, August 5th, features Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Overwhelmed by an unusual fate in the blue August sea) by Lina Wertmüller, an Italian cinema classic set on a small desert island where Mariangela Melato, who plays a wealthy, cultured bourgeois woman from the industrial North, and Giancarlo Giannini, who plays a poor, rude, uneducated, and communist man from the rural South, are shipwrecked. Saturday, August 9th, sees the screening of Michael Radford's Il postino (The Postman), Massimo Troisi's last film, a film about poetry shot on locations in Procida, Salina, and Pantelleria. On Wednesday the 13th, you can watch Ferie d'agosto (August holidays), Paolo Virzì's second film, which depicts a social conflict in the Ventotene island during the August holidays between two families on vacation, one left-wing, the other right-wing. On Sunday, August 17th, you can watch Un altro ferragosto (Another August), a sequel to Ferie d'agosto, set twenty-eight years later, in which ideologies seem definitively gone, leaving only cynicism and fragile bourgeois certainties.

On Thursday, August 21st, you can watch Caro diario (Dear diary) by Nanni Moretti, winner of the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival: in the second film, Moretti travels to the Aeolian Islands, attempting to escape the frenzy of city life. On Wednesday, August 27th, you can watch L'isola (The island) di Arturo by Damiano Damiani, based on the novel of the same name by Elsa Morante, a reflection on the suspended age of adolescence set in Procida. On Sunday, August 31st, the festival hosts Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (Terra di Dio) (Stromboli (Land of God)), in which the contrast between protagonist Ingrid Bergman, a restless stranger, and the wild land that hosts her, where she feels alien, becomes the core of a parable about solitude, lack of communication, and the clash between civilization and primordial nature. The program concludes on Thursday, September 4th, with Emanuele Crialese's Respiro (Breath), an extraordinarily subtle reflection on the relationship between the individual and the environment, in which the island of Lampedusa is seen not only as a geographical space but also as a symbolic territory of isolation, desire, and even liberation.

For the complete program, please visit the official website: www.casadelcinema.it/en/event/isole/

Photo: Casa del Cinema official Facebook page