Adirectors Franco Maresco and Pedro Costa were awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the forty-fourth edition of the “Laceno d'oro”, the historic international festival of 'real cinema' of Avellino, directed by Antonio Spagnuolo, which will take place from 1 to 8 December in various locations around the city. The event celebrates sixty years since the historic first edition created by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1959 together with the Irpinia intellectuals Camillo Marino and Giacomo D'Onofrio, to enhance the territory with a film festival of neorealist inspiration. In continuity with Pasolini's intuition, the Laceno d'oro returns with eight days of auteur, independent and research cinema, with screenings, meetings with guests, three competitions, retrospectives, exhibitions, and book presentations. The heart of the festival is the Cinema Partenio with events also at the Cinema Comunale of Bagnoli Irpino and at the Monumental Complex of the Borbonico Prison.
Author of “La mafia non è più quella di una volta”, a journey into the mafia and anti-mafia in today’s Palermo, Special Jury Prize at Venice 76, the Sicilian director Franco Maresco will receive the award, “Laceno d’oro 44 Lifetime Achievement Award”, on Monday 2 December at 20,30:2017 pm at the Partenio Cinema (Via Giuseppe Verdi), during an evening in his honor where he will meet the public before the screening of the film. It is 2014, twenty-five years after the Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres, and Franco Maresco creates the film starting from his recent work dedicated to Letizia Battaglia, an eighty-year-old photographer who has told the story of the mafia wars with her shots, defined by the New York Times as one of the “eleven women who have marked our time”. The director feels the need to pair Letizia with a figure from the other side of the fence: Ciccio Mira, a 'legendary' organizer of street parties, already the protagonist in XNUMX of "Belluscone. A Sicilian story". In the few years that separate the two films, Mira seems to have changed. Perhaps he seeks redemption, as a man and as a manager, to the point of organizing a singular event at the Zen in Palermo: the neomelodici for Falcone and Borsellino. Yet his words still betray a certain nostalgia for "the mafia of the past". Meanwhile, attending the celebrations for the anti-mafia martyrs, Maresco's disenchantment is confronted with Letizia Battaglia's passion.
Portuguese director Pedro Costa will receive the “Pier Paolo Pasolini Lifetime Achievement Award” on Sunday 8 December at 20,30:2019 pm at Cinema Partenio. After the award ceremony, his latest film “Vitalina Varela” will be screened, which triumphed at Locarno 2014 with the Golden Leopard for best film and best female performance. A powerful work on Cape Verdean emigration to the Fontainhas district, a shantytown in Lisbon, a theme addressed several times by the author, the film tells the story of Vitalina Varela, a character who already appeared in “Cavalo dinheiro” in 55, a XNUMX-year-old Cape Verdean woman who arrives in Lisbon three days after her husband’s funeral. Although the husband who betrayed and repudiated her is no longer with her, Vitalina decides to stay in Portugal to process her grief. A personal story that becomes a collective symbol, a film that confirms the sumptuousness and rigor of Costa's cinematography capable of blending light and shadow, reality and vision.
The Laceno d'oro, organized by the Circolo ImmaginAzione with the artistic direction of Antonio Spagnuolo in collaboration with Aldo Spiniello, Sergio Sozzo, Leonardo Lardieri of the film magazine Sentieri Selvaggi and Maria Vittoria Pellecchia, with the contribution of the Campania Region and MIBACT - General Directorate of Cinema and Audiovisual. With the patronage of the Province of Avellino, the Municipality of Avellino, the Municipality of Bagnoli Irpino, the Order of Journalists of Campania. In partnership with the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Salerno and Avellino. In collaboration with Sentieri Selvaggi, the Pier Paolo Pasolini Archive Study Center, the Central Institute for Demoethnoanthropology, Quaderni di Cinemasud, Cactus Film Production, Eikon cultural association, Coordination of Campania Film Festivals, Roulette Agency and Godot Art Bistrot, ABAP Superintendence of Salerno and Avellino.
Article published on November 26, 2019 - 08:47
