The master of French social cinema is the second international guest announced after Paul Schrader (USA).
The French director Robert Guédiguian, “Pier Paolo Pasolini” Lifetime Achievement Award winner, will open the 48th edition of the Laceno d'Oro International Film Festival in Avellino. The award named after the founder of the Irpinia film festival will be presented to him on December 3 during an evening of honor at the Cinema Partenio (Via Giuseppe Verdi, free admission).
Master of social and political cinema from beyond the Alps (À l'attaque!, Les Promenades du Champ de Mars, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The House by the Sea, Gloria Mundi), singer of his Marseille, a retrospective will be dedicated to Robert Guédiguian which also includes his latest recent work “And the Party Continues”.
Guédiguian is the second major international guest after the American filmmaker Paul Schrader (Lifetime Achievement Award “Laceno d'Oro”) announced for the 2023 edition of the historic 'cinema del reale' festival in Avellino, confirming his capacity for attraction and undisputed originality: the detailed program will be illustrated on Friday 1 December at 10:30 am in the Grasso room of Palazzo Caracciolo (Piazza Libertà 1, Avellino), the institutional headquarters of the Province.
Founded by Pasolini in 1959 together with the Irpinia intellectuals Camillo Marino and Giacomo D'Onofrio, the festival, created to promote Irpinia with a film festival of neorealist inspiration, is organized by the Circolo ImmaginAzione of Avellino, chaired by Antonio Spagnuolo, with the artistic direction of Maria Vittoria Pellecchia in collaboration with Aldo Spiniello, Sergio Sozzo and Leonardo Lardieri.
In recent years, the Laceno d'Oro International Film Festival has hosted filmmakers such as Abel Ferrara, Alexander Sokurov, Elia Suleiman, Jia Zhangke, Marco Bellocchio, Olivier Assayas, Amir Naderi, Pedro Costa, Aleksej German Jr., Julio Bressane, Carlos Reygadas, Laurent Cantet, Franco Maresco, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Mario Martone, Ken Loach, Miguel Gomes, Stéphane Brizé, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and many others.
The eight-day Avellino cinema festival will host screenings, meetings with authors, concerts, exhibitions, masterclasses and workshops. The program will focus on three international competitions: “Laceno d'Oro 48”, reserved for feature films, both fiction and documentary, “Gli occhi sulla città”, dedicated to short films on the themes of urban spaces, the environment and the landscape, interpreted with maximum freedom, and “Spazio Campania”, the section dedicated to productions made in the Campania region or by Campania authors.
The Laceno d'Oro International Film Festival is realized with the contribution of Regione Campania and Film Commission Regione Campania, with the contribution and patronage of the Directorate General of Cinema and Audiovisual - Ministry of Culture, with the patronage of the Province of Avellino and the Municipality of Avellino. In collaboration with Sentieri Selvaggi, Quaderni di Cinemasud, Eikon, CFCC, Afic.
Main sponsors: Pasta Armando, Confindustria Avellino, ASD Scandone, MAGMA, Consortium for the protection of Irpinia wines. With the support of ACIT, Sanfilippo & Partners, Multisala Partenio, Roulette Agency, Movieplex Mercogliano, Amica Pubblicità.
Media partner Orticalab.
Biography
Passion for social and political cinema, this is the distinctive trait of Robert Guédiguian: French director, born in 1953, to an Armenian father and German mother, he made his city, Marseille, "the form and the language" of his cinema. What was once the neighborhood not far from the dockers described by the poet Louis Brauquier, l'Estaque, now incorporated into the port, is the natural setting of his childhood. A world "structured by the workers' movement", marked by human solidarity, a mark on his conscience as an artist and militant.
In the 1981s he moved to Paris, where he met director René Féret with whom he wrote his first screenplays. His directorial debut came in XNUMX with “Dernier été”, bringing to the big screen the proletarian reality of southern France, between the failure of the left, the decline of the community and the new era.
of individualism. Themes that return in “Rouge Midi” (1983) and “Ki lo sa?” (1985). He founded AGAT Films & Cie, a company that would produce the works of established and emerging authors such as Paul Vecchiali, Lucas Belvaux, Sólveig Anspach, Cédric Kahn, Lech Kowalski, Éric Zonca, Pierre Salvadori, Diego Lerman. After “Dieu vomit les tièdes” (1989), he directed “L'Argent fait le bonheur” (1993), a film distributed on television that inaugurated his long collaboration with the screenwriter Jean-Louis Milesi. With the success of “À la vie, à la mort!” (1994) he gave in to the next love story “Marius et Jeannette” (1997), opening the Un certain regard section of the 50th
Cannes Film Festival.
As with the contemporary novels of the writer Jean Claude Izzo, Guédiguian's films in this period record and reflect on the transitions of French and Marseille society: from racial integration ("À la place du cœur" - 1998) to the decadence of the city ("Marie-Jo et ses deux amours" - 2002), a multicultural space that "encompasses all the problems of the world". In the following years he tested himself with different genres: if with "Le promeneur du Champ de Mars" (2005) he tried his hand at the biopic, recounting the last days of François Mitterrand, with "Le Voyage en Arménie" (2006) he experimented with the road movie, in an increasingly unstable ideological precariousness, both of references and opinions. As a reaction to the upheaval of values of the new millennium, in 2009 with “L'armée du crime” – based on the true story of Missak Manouchian, Armenian poet and communist, and his 22 companions murdered by the Nazis in February 1944 – he paid homage to the French Resistance, to return to Marseille, bringing together themes, actors and settings, with “Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro” (2011) and with “Au fil d'Ariane” (2014). «For me, one of the most serious problems of today's society is the fact that there is no longer a class consciousness. In the sense that we can no longer even talk about the 'working class', which is why I talk about the 'poor people'. And yet, the consciousness of being part of the 'poor people' does not exist.» If Paris is an attraction and Marseille is a passport, as Jean Claude Izzo writes, Robert Guédiguian's cinema is the pass to discover the changes and defects of French society: to guarantee, from the Old Port of Marseille, an overview of the conflicts with the Mediterranean, the cancellation of ideologies, the global bewilderment of individuals.
Article published on November 27, 2023 - 11:37
