The Italian connection

By PETER CALDER

When we were very young, the Italians were big in the movies. Those of us whose film education was undertaken at Sunday night double features at the Lido feasted on Italian fare: the films of De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, Bertolucci and Fellini lit up the screen in first releases or reruns.

Sure, we liked Bergman and Louis Malle and Werner Herzog, but the Italians were ... well, they were Italian.

Italian movies have had a bad run here in the succeeding decades. Getting producers to make prints available for the main festival circuit has driven festival director Bill Gosden close to distraction and Australasian rights to many films have been tied up by Australian-based distributor Palace, which has been reluctant to invest in showing the movies here because the returns were likely to be very limited.

Enter the Italian Film Festival which now, in its ninth year, seems to have come of age. It started as a collection of 50s and 60s classics in scratchy prints and in some years included titles which had attracted little attention within Italy and had barely screened elsewhere.

But this year's 16-film lineup is the best yet, thanks largely to the enterprise of festival director Tony Lambert who has forged strong relationships with the Italians and Palace and convinced both that New Zealand filmgoers deserve to be treated like grown-ups.

The festival, which opens next week, has also found its way back to the Rialto and into the Bridgeway - both better-fitting venues than the Berkeley in Mission Bay where it has played in recent years.

Those with fond memories of the 60s are well-catered for this year, with new prints of the Fellini classics La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2.

La Dolce Vita - the film that gave the English language the word paparazzi - is possibly the most famous Italian film of all time; 8 1/2. is widely considered Fellini's masterpiece - he said of it that "it coalesces for me the essence of cinema" - and is accompanied by a 50-minute documentary, made last year, which investigates the fabled lost alternative ending.

The programme includes films from the past couple of years which have attracted plaudits at Cannes and Venice and cleaned up most of the honours at the Italian Oscar equivalent, the David di Donatello Awards.

The Heart Elsewhere will appeal to those with a taste for impeccably designed historical romance.

More edgy is I Like To Work, the politically charged story of a woman subjected to creeping harassment in her job when the company's new owners want to get rid of her. It falters in the final moments by going for the one-year-later scene, but for most of its length it is a compelling white-knuckle ride.

Other impressive features from the top of the programme are Remember Me, which stars two of Italy's more lustrous actresses, Laura Morante and Monica Bellucci, in a drama about mid-life crisis and infidelity; and Facing Windows, a magical realist meditation on the power of aspiration, a film which is more classically Italian.

For those of seriously cineaste persuasion, a lecture by Dr Bernadette Luciano, head of Italian studies at the University of Auckland, is an added attraction. The lecture, an overview of Italian cinema, will be delivered twice and precede Agata and the Storm.

That film, which reunites the director and star of Bread and Tulips, one of the more impressive offerings from a couple of years back, is also the festival's opening night attraction.

* Italian Film Festival, Rialto and Bridgeway Cinemas, October 6 to 20.