The Italian critic Giona Nazzaro, who heads the Venice Critics’ Week, disagrees with those who lament the absence of a potent new generation of Italian helmers after Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone.
“Compared with Sorrentino and Garrone’s generation, there is a different type of Italian cinema now,” he said. “There is a generation that grew up working with very limited budgets, not just because they are condemned to this, but also because they have chosen to have greater productive and aesthetic freedom. Therefore it’s not a qualitative gap. They represent a different vision.”
Invisible by Edoardo De Angelis
Nazzaro cited Venice Days title Indivisible, directed by Edoardo De Angelis, about teenage conjoined-twin sisters with beautiful voices who come from the suburbs of Naples and support their family as a performing act.
The film will segue from Venice to Toronto, and the London Film Festivals.
Le Ultime Cose by Irene Dionisio
Another Critics’ Week picture, Le Ultime Cose, by first-timer Irene Dionisio, is a drama interweaving three tales centering on a Turin pawn shop against the backdrop of Italy’s economic crisis.
“The problem,” according to Nazzaro, is not so much the state of Italian cinema at present, “but the state of those who cover it in the media, and also produce it, and continue to be in this state of mourning, as if the great Italian cinema no longer exists.”
