nothin Festival Of Italian Cinema Makes Hollywood… | New Haven Independent

Festival Of Italian Cinema Makes Hollywood Watch Its Back

Human Capital.

The main idea is that we want to have an event that is able to connect the New Haven community, and in particular the Italian-American community, with the Yale student community,” said Chris Kaiser, a sixth-year PhD student in Yale’s Italian department. And we want to do that in the context of Italian cinema. It’s our little contribution towards overcoming the town-gown divide.”

Hence the 10th Annual Festival of New Italian Cinema, which began last night and runs through Sunday at the Whitney Humanities Center.

After Hollywood, Italian cinema ranks as perhaps the richest and most influential in the medium’s century-and-a-quarter-long history. Italian filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, and Federico Fellini have left a lasting impact on their art, in style and in substance. Their works embody certain defining moments in movie history, from the gritty existentialism of neorealism to the introspective creativity of auteur cinema, and are as relevant in today’s movie landscape as they were in the mid-20th century.

The Festival of New Italian Cinema will screen recent examples from this splendid cinematic heritage. Coming on the heels of a recent career retrospective of Pier Paolo Pasolini — the controversial Italian poet, intellectual, and filmmaker who authored such infamous masterpieces as Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom — the Whitney Humanities Center will host five of the best contemporary Italian movies, as chosen by teachers and graduate students from Yale’s Department of Italian Language and Literature.

The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer.

This year’s line-up includes a range of films that deal with national identity, organized crime, and, according to student and longtime festival participant Kaiser, reflections on the power of cinema itself.”

Fasten Your Seatbelts, which opened the festival, is a romantic melodrama about love and illness from Turkish-Italian director Ferzan Özpetek. Human Capital, Paolo Virzi’s 2013 thriller that won seven David di Dinatello awards — the Italian Oscars — including Best Film, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay, highlights the troubling consequences of applying a price to a human life. The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer, which plays on Saturday night, is a provocative comedy about organized crime as seen through the eyes of a young boy growing up in Palermo. The films 45th Parallel and I Am from Naples round up the festival on Sunday afternoon. The first is a romantic comedy set in Turin. The other is a skewering of Neapolitan mafioso stereotypes from directors Antonio and Marco Manetti.

But Kaiser and his fellow organizers look upon this festival as more than just a rare opportunity for New Haveners to see the best of contemporary Italian cinema, both the blockbusters (Human Capital, The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer) and the experimental (Fasten Your Seatbelts). It is also a form of social outreach, a way of using cinema from abroad to connect closer to home.

The 10th Annual Festival of New Italian Cinema runs from Apr. 23 through Apr. 26 at the Whitney Humanities Center. All screenings are free and open to the public, though you must reserve your free tickets here.

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