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Vancouver Italian Film Week 2022 | Vancouver International Film Festival

2022 01 07 vancouver italian film week

The Vancouver International Film Festival, with the support of the Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, presents the 2022 edition of the Vancouver Italian Film Week.

VANCOUVER ITALIAN FILM WEEK 2022
January 7 to January 13

Various Locations

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS AND TO PURCHASE TICKETS

 

Time to trade Vancouver’s winter clouds for the sunny skies of Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, Rome, and Tuscany – seen through the eyes of Italy’s best filmmakers, past and present. Italian Film Week features 14 films, seven new releases, seven classics from masters like Fellini, Visconti, De Sica and Monicelli, showing in restored 4K digital prints. There’s a spotlight on actor Toni Servillo, who stars in four of this year’s selections, including the poignant prison drama The Inner Cage and a biopic about the legendary comic actor Eduardo Scarpetta, The King of Laughter, as well as his landmark performance in The Great Beauty. Our opening film and the centrepiece of the selection is Emma Dante’s widely acclaimed The Macaluso Sisters, winner of the Italian Film Critics Syndicate Best Film award.

FILM LINEUP

 

The Macaluso Sisters

1985. The Macaluso sisters are five young, orphaned siblings who live in and work from a shabby rooftop apartment in Palermo, Sicily. One hot summer, a rare beach outing is planned on a day off work. Near the end of a day of enchantment, reverie, and amorous trysts, a shocking catastrophe transpires. That single event will change the course of the relationships between the sisters for the rest of their lives. 

Dear Diary

Nanni Moretti picked up the Best Director prize at Cannes in 1994 with this deceptive doodle of a movie, a personal memoir that feels like a Roman counterpart to late 1970s Woody Allen; it’s very funny, self-reflexive and free-flowing. It falls into three parts: the filmmaker’s musing on cinema atop a Vespa, (including a pilgrimage to the site of Pasolini’s murder), a trip to the Aeolian Islands to work on his new screenplay, and his search for health and wellness after breaking out in a nagging skin rash.

Il Boom

Although Vittorio De Sica is best known for neo-realist tearjerkers like The Bicycle Thief, he was a dab hand at comedy, as this 1963 social satire aptly demonstrates. Alberto Sordi is the executive going to extreme lengths and racking up debt to keep his wife happy and their lifestyle on a par with their peers.

The Great Beauty

Updating Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for our own decadent era, Sorrentino gives us jaded cultural commentator Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo). Jep has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades, but after his 65th birthday and a shock from the past, Jep looks past the nightclubs and parties to find a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.

The Passionate Thief

In Mario Monicelli’s evergreen 1960 comedy, struggling actress Tortorella (Anna Magnani) just wants to have a nice time on New Year’s Eve, but she is unwittingly dragged into a night of attempted thievery by her broke friend Umberto (Totò) and his partner-in-crime (Ben Gazzara).

The Inner Cage

Toni Servillo (The Great Beauty; The King of Laughter) stars as Gaetano, Captain of the Guards in an old, crumbling Sardinian prison in this compassionate character drama. The prison is due to be shut down, but an administrative error means that a handful of prisoners and skeleton staff remain while the paperwork is sorted out. When the prisoners go on hunger strike, Gaetano negotiates with their de facto leader, a mobster named Carmine (Silvio Orlando) and they carve out an unorthodox arrangement…

Nights of Cabiria

In the role that won her the Best Actress award at Cannes, Giulietta Masina stars as Cabiria, a tough Roman streetwalker who, after a near-drowning by her pimp boyfriend, is swept off her feet by a square, but sympathetic, accountant… Federico Fellini’s showcase for his wife won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of its year.”A cinematic masterpiece… a deep, wrenching and eloquent filmgoing experience.” New York Time

Death in Venice

Dirk Bogarde plays the composer Gustave Aschenbach (loosely based on Mahler, whose 3rd and 5th Symphonies are woven through the soundtrack). He arrives in Venice to recuperate from illness. But the city is succumbing to a deadly cholera epidemic. Infatuated by a beautiful adolescent boy, Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), the artist is unable to tear himself away. Visconti’s film of Thomas Mann’s acclaimed autobiographical novella is an exquisite piece of cinema, languorous, lavish, steeped in longing and regret.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

In 1971 at the world premiere of Death in Venice in London, Italian director Luchino Visconti proclaimed Björn Andrésen, the teen star of his latest film, “The most beautiful boy in the world.” This is the story of a boy who was thrust to international stardom for his iconic looks and lived a life of glamour and exploitation. 50 years later, Björn looks back.”Haunting… psychologically probing.” AO Scott, New York TimesDeath in Venice also shows at the VIFF Centre during Italian Film Week.

Caffe Italia

Beginning on a high point with Italy beating West Germany to win the FIFA World Cup in 1982, this poignant and evocative 1985 documentary is a portrait of Italian immigrants to Montreal – their stories, and their parents’ stories, their thoughts about country, tradition, history and home. Among them is the young actor Toni Nardi, who features in some dramatic sketches prepared especially for the film. It’s a fascinating time capsule, but also an important piece of oral history in its own right.

The King of Laughter

Toni Servillo gives another astounding, complex performance as the famed Neapolitan comic actor and playwright Eduardo Scarpetta, whose showmanship was shadowed by equally ostentatious personal life, involving multiple wives, mistresses and children, most of whom wound up in his theatre company.

The Predators

A plan to exhume the body of Friedrich Nietzsche is one of several juicy plot motors in this confident and compelling black comedy about two very different Roman families, the working class Vismaras and the bourgeois Favone clan. The directorial debut of 28-year-old actor Pietro Castellitto (who also plays Federico, an assistant philosophy professor, and penned the screenplay), The Predators is a toothy ensemble comedy with plenty of laughs.

The Hand of God

Paolo Sorrentino – The Great Beauty; Il Divo; The Young Pope – returns with his most personal movie, the story of his coming of age in Naples in the 1980s. The title references the Catholic faith so deeply embedded in that culture, but also superstar Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, who used the phrase to justify a notorious goal against England in the World Cup, and who amazed everyone by signing for Napoli… and to a devastating family tragedy that befalls the teenage Sorrentino.

The Tale of King Crab

Twinned tales about the legendary C19th drunk and treasure seeker Luciano (Gabriele Sill) make for an evening of fabulous (if fanciful) storytelling and merriment in this intriguing first dramatic feature from documentary filmmaking team Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. In the first tale, we learn why he was exiled from his village outside Rome. In the second, we watch him hunt for gold in Tierra del Fuego, “the arsehole of the world”.

  • Organizzato da: Vancouver International Film Festival
  • In collaborazione con: Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver | Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto