Italians at Cannes

Cannes Film Festival

Call it a chaotic circus, a playground for starlettes and wannabe actors, or a showcase for "the good, the bad and the ugly", with its immense market and its amazing competition the Cannes film festival is, no doubts about it, the most prestigious of the European film events, and one of the oldest one.

Running for the Palma d'or were Il Caimano, by Nanni Moretti and L'Amico di Famiglia, by Paolo Sorrentino, a bitter account on the Italian political and social situation the first one, and a disturbing drama with an usurer as a central character the latter.

Moretti is well known and appreciated in France and is a favourite of the Cannes Film Festival, where he won the Palm d'Or two years ago with the film La stanza del figlio.

Long applauded at the end of the screening within the Un Certain Regard section was Il regista di Matrimoni, by Marco Bellocchio, a well known director in France and labelled by a foreign journalist "the last Mohican of the neo-realism".

Presented within La Qunzainne des Realizateurs section and greeted by a seven minutes standig ovation at the end of the screening Anche libero va bene, the film that marks the directorial debut of one of the "beautiful" of the Italian cinema, Kim Rossi Stewart. To the disappointment of those who still believe that beauty in cinema is a synonym of dumbness, young Rossi Stewart proved to be not only a fine actor but an excellent director, signing a film of a classic style and universal theme.

"He was a very generous director", states Barbara Bubulova, who co-stars with Rossi Stewart in the film. "He worked very hard all day behind the camera, and then stayed many extra hours at the end of each day to shoot his own sequence last, so we could go home while he kept working".

And, last but not least and very well received was the documentary "Volevo solo vivere", by Mimmo Calopresti, a touching documentary on the drama of the Shoe  screened out of competition and made for the Steven Spielberg Foudation.

Sandra Bordigoni