Keen eye for Italian

Fever is a favourite of two critics.

The survival of the annual Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival, the 11th incarnation of which opens at the Rialto and Bridgeway Cinemas on Wednesday, is testament to the persistence of its director Tony Lambert.

Mounting a programme of Italian films here is no easy task since the Australasian rights to most titles are usually snapped up by Melbourne-based Palace Films, which has good connections in Italy. Palace finds a ready market for its Italian product in Australia but is reluctant to show pictures here because the audiences are so small. This has forced Lambert to think laterally, establishing his own commercial relationships in Italy. The result is a 17-film programme that makes up the largest single-culture film festival and the largest Italian cultural event in New Zealand.

Even a quick survey of Italian cinema over the past couple of decades cannot fail to notice its darkening tone. Since Giuseppe Tornatore's Everybody's Fine, in which an ageing Marcello Mastroianni visits his children in four corners of a troubled country, much Italian cinema has recorded life in a land very different from the sunlit idyll tourists know and love.

Many of the movies in this year's line-up tackle serious subjects, but the programme also has some classic comedies.

Once You're Born, When Do The Girls Show Up? and Fever are in the best five of last year according to Lorenzo Codelli, the Italian contributor to Variety's annual International Film Guide. Fever also gets a good account from the Hollywood Reporter.

The Keys To the House follows a few days in the life of a man and the physically and mentally disabled child he abandoned at birth and has returned to reclaim. Heartrending and heartwarming, it completely avoids disease-of-the-week-movie sentimentality, patronising neither its characters nor its viewers. Andrea Rossi, as a boy who suffers from muscular dystrophy, turns in a performance of effortless, irresistible charm. The film is the work of Gianno Amelio, who made the superb The Stolen Children in the early 1990s and is distinguished by the same emotional authenticity and integrity.

Also promising is The Tiger and the Snow, in which Roberto Benigni again uses a war as a background to a non-war story, as he did in the Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful in 1998.

This time he follows the object of his obsession to Iraq and the film has plenty of sideswipes at the international presence in that country while following its oddball romance to its illogical conclusion.

Thrillers, historical dramas, comedies and a documentary round out the programme which will play in the four main centres and Nelson, Napier and Hamilton until early December.