Programme, 18 November
AWARD CEREMONY
Golden Olive Tree Competition | Cristina Soldano Award
and Mario Verdone Award
Closing Film: La chimera by Alice Rohrwacher
Special Event Premiere: Toni by Nathan Ambrosioni
The closing night, Saturday, 18 Nov., of the 24th edition of the European Film Festival, directed by Alberto La Monica, will start with the award ceremony, at 8 p.m., including the presentation of the Golden Olive Tree – Cristina Soldano Award along with other awards of this edition. The directors and actors of the films in competition will be present, together with those from the other sections of the Festival along with siblings Luca, Silvia and Carlo Verdone, the latter in streaming, for the presentation of the 14th edition of the Mario Verdone Award, established in agreement with the Verdone family by the European Film Festival, in collaboration with the CSC and the SNGCI.
Following the awards ceremony (as always in Room 1) will be the presentation of the Festival’s closing film La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher (Italy, France, Switzerland, 2023) with the presence of actress Yile Vianello in a meeting moderated by Enrico Magrelli. The film follows the story of Arthur, who upon returning to a small town on the Tyrrhenian Sea, finds his wretched band of thieves of Etruscan trophies and archaeological wonders. His gift is to feel the emptiness of the earth in which the vestiges of a past world are found. La Chimera will be in theaters starting from Nov. 23 with 01 Distribution.
Room 2, (at 9:30 p.m.) will feature The Mario Verdone Award winning film while Room 3, (at 9:30 p.m.) will feature the winning film of the Golden Olive Tree Competition.
Special Event Premiere at 6 p.m., in Room 2, with Toni by Nathan Ambrosioni. Antonia, known as Toni, a 43-year-old former successful singer, is raising her five children alone. Now, as her two oldest are about to go off to college, she wonders what she will do when everyone has left home; will she still have time to rebuild her life? The film, a Chi-Fou-Mi Productions, Studiocanal, France 2 Cinema co-production, is being released on Dec. 7, distributed by Wanted Cinema.
For the Cinema & Reality section, in Room 5, 6 p.m., Renato Chiocca’s All That Will Be (2022) follows the adventures of Dennis, a young resident in a group home who, invited by his social worker, Massimiliano, joins the Girasoli Tour, a 3500-km bicycle journey through hidden Italy of social economy.
For Protagonists of Italian Cinema, a section dedicated this year to Micaela Ramazzotti, Room 5, at 8:30 p.m., Paolo Virzì’s Like Crazy (Italy, France, 2016) will be screened. Beatrice Morandini Valdirana is a blabbermouth and a self-proclaimed countess who likes to believe she is in intimate relationship with world leaders. Donatella is a young fragile tattooed woman who conceals a painful secret. They are both patients in a mental institution and classified as socially dangerous; they become friends and decide to run away together in search of a bit of happiness.
The section Protagonists of European Cinema, on the other hand, which pays tribute to Roman Polanski, will offer on the last day the screening of The Palace (Italy, Switzerland, Poland, France, 2023) in Room 3 at 6:30 p.m. The Palace Hotel is a building with a gothic, fairy-tale atmosphere where rich, pampered and spoiled guests annually meet up from all over the world. The 2000 New Year’s Eve party has brought them all together, but hovering in the air is the Millennium Bug and the fear or hope that at the stroke of midnight the accounts of big financiers might suffer unexpected instability. What is actually brewing is a war fought over the extravagance and eccentricities of the hotel guests.
In Room 4, at 6:30 p.m., Rudy Valentino (2017) also concludes the tribute to Nico Cirasola, to whom the European Film Festival has dedicated a retrospective of his six feature films. The film recounts, between reality and fantasy, the return in the summer of 1923 of Rodolfo Valentino to Castellaneta, his hometown. The story begins in the present day: in a small theater in the Apulian town, an amateur troupe is rehearsing a show about the star’s triumphant return. The rehearsal is interrupted by an apparition: two characters dressed in 1920s clothing who claim to be Rodolfo and his wife. Is this an impostor or the real Rudy magically swooped in from the past?
At 9 p.m., in Room 4 the final screenings of Festival in Corto: for CSC Roma Lia by Giulia Regini, Tante care cose by Federico Fadiga and La vedova più bella del paese by Mino Capuano; Il campo dei giganti by Chiara Stravato (CSC L’Aquila); for Puglia Show out-of-competition L’estate di Virna by Alessandro Zizzo, Addhumare by Hermes Mangialardo, Super Jesus by Vito Palumbo and Natìa by Roberta Spagnuolo.
Devised and organized by the Cultural Association “Art Promotion,” the European Film Festival 2023, within the framework of the Apulia Cinefestival Network 2023, is an initiative carried out by the Puglia Region, Apulia Film Commission and ARET PugliaPromozione as part of the intervention “Promoting the Puglia of Cinema 2023” with resources from the POR Puglia 2014/2020 – Axis VI – Action 6.8. and released resources from POR Puglia 2000-2006, Measure 2.1.
It is also realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture-Directorate General for Cinema and Audiovisual.
Recognized by the Ministry of Culture as an “event of national interest,” the Festival is a member of the Association of Italian Film Festivals and is organized with the support of the Municipality of Lecce and the University of Salento, and in collaboration with Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, S.N.G.C.I., FIPRESCI, S.N.C.C.I., National Short Film Center, Lecce Biblio-Museum Pole, and the Rotary Club of Lecce.
Media partners: Cinecittà News, Cineuropa, FRED Film Radio
Technical partners: Acqua Orsini, Agricole Vallone, Augustus Color, Futuro Remoto Gioielli, Liberrima, Quarta Caffè, Rai Cinema Channel
