There are 18 features in a line-up that is, perhaps as a sign of the times, short on the sunny comedies that have attracted most audiences in the past. Of the titles I managed to preview, One Day More stood out for its jaunty pace and the very engaging lead performance by Fabio Volo, who wrote the novel on which the film is based.
He plays Giacomo Bonetti, a Milanese whose staunch resistance to the idea of settling down is shaken by the prospect of turning 40 and shattered when he falls for a beautiful woman who rides the same tram. He is thunderstruck when she invites him for coffee, but that's nothing compared to the shock he feels when she says that, having walked into his life, she is walking straight out again, headed for New York.
The way it pans out is hardly unpredictable - this is a romcom so Hollywood in style that a remake seems redundant and the score at times feels like it was written for a diamond-ring advertisement - but it has twists and turns aplenty and enough cosmopolitan charm to brighten up the end of winter.
But the sublime lighting and camerawork of the opening scenes soon make it plain that this is no fly-on-the-wall documentary: working to an exacting script, the film-makers have contrived a compelling blend of reality and artifice in which the boundaries between daily prison life, rehearsal and performance become - sometimes discomfortingly - blurred.
The words the prisoners use are a rough, vernacular paraphrase of the original and the drama is pared back to its elemental essentials. But there is never for a moment a sense that this is a record of a well-meaning rehabilitation initiative. Though conceived on a smaller scale than, say Kurosawa's Throne of Blood or Grigori Kozintsev's King Lear, this is every bit as eye-opening an interpretation and - at an economical 76 minutes - very digestible for people who were taught to hate Shakespeare at school.
Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy, a drama that minutely examines the aftermath of an 1969 anarchist bombing, is perhaps a little detailed for the uninitiated. (I found myself imagining how a movie about the intricacies of police action against 1981 Springbok tour protesters would play in Rome) but is certainly a handsome and accomplished piece of work.
But Shun Li and the Poet deserves a wide audience. It stars Rade Serbedzija, the veteran prolific Croatian Serb actor as Bepi, a grizzled and grumpy retired fisherman who befriends a Chinese immigrant (Zhao Tao) when she comes to work in the portside bar where he drinks.
It's a platonic love story rich in poetic touches and the two lead performances (Zhao's won best actress in the Italian Oscar equivalents) are beyond praise.
It is something of an oddity that the standout performances of an Italian Film Festival should come from two non-Italians and an ensemble of convicted criminals.
What: 2013 Italian Film Festival
Where and when: Rialto and Bridgeway Cinemas Auckland from September 25; Paramount Cinemas, Auckland from October 9;
Info: italianfilmfestival.co.nz
- TimeOut
