Milano Film Festival

Italians get-togetherIntroduction
Film programme
Work and crisis

Introduction
To check a person´s heartbeat, you can take their pulse, but how do you do this with Italian cinema? You have to choose a vein and watch it as the images flow to see whether it is healthy or not. This year, in producing the Incontri italiani section, where we show a certain independent cinema which is unlikely to reach the cinemas, we realized that the divisions of last year - fixed between genre and geography - were to be thrown away. And we have no regrets about this. Apart from a group of short films on ¨Work & Crisis¨, a subject at long last present in fiction films, when we drew the conclusions of what we had seen, the need emerged to make room for gazes which, directly or not, have to do with the present and sometimes with the events in the news in Italy. The vein which we have chosen to observe is that of the documentary: the best instrument at present to open up the dominant narratives, both in the field of fiction and in that of information. Often constrained by low budgets, animated by a passion for the subject, without the certainty of being shown at the cinema or on TV - a media which often required formatting and standardizing the contents to show them - the documentary becomes the only genre that can return to the â€œmagnificent obsessionâ€ that reality should be. That all the works present are of Milanese origin (by topic or director) is in part coincidence and to a great extent a choice. They are the pieces of a political cinema in the broad sense: a cinema that evokes relations between people, power and memory, a natural counterpoint to Milan, greatly concentrated on its self-celebration, and with little attention on understanding itself. The documentary reacts by offering a variety of tensions. Films like Hermanitos by Jacopo Tartarone, on the gangs of immigrant youths, or Le White by Simona Risi, on the question of the asbestos houses in Rogoredo, start off from events in the news and extend them: the cinema becomes the gaze from the inside of a problem with a richness that cannot be expressed in other media. Otherwise, it is for the memory of the citym as in Via Ippocrate 45 by Alessandro Penta which reconstructs the story of the former Paolo Pini psychiatric hospital, thirty years after the Basaglia law which closed these institutions down, telling us what madness is for those who finally live in freedom. Clearly anthropological, and shifting to the political, is Giuliano Ricci´s gaze in Non câ€™è più una majorette a Villalba, which, starting off from a village in southern Italy, famous as the birthplace of a Mafioso, talks by negation of the whole country surrounding it. Whilst La particella di Dio by Logo Video, a Milanese collective that has produced a film on a scientific topic, is a case apart, by uniting the portrait of an unconventional scientist with the visions of a film enthusiast, the attitude of two other films in approaching the other is different yet again. In Istruzioni per essere Felice, Elvio Annese plays with his private life to find a poetic tension with the subject to follow, the solitary Felice, whilst private life, in Ritratto di famiglia con badante by Alessandra Speciale, becomes the privileged scene to observe a world of female relationships: the relations between a ninety-year-old grandmother and the young foreign caregiver who looks after her are the opportunity to investigate two different, only apparently distant, solitudes. The use of a note of intimacy by many directors has an unexpected wealth that makes the documentary not a diary, but an adventure in real life.
Alessandro Beretta

Film programme

	Hermanitos by Jacopo Tartarone, Italy, 2010, 35mm 50'
	Le White by Simona Risi, Italy, 2010, HD, 50'
	Via Ippocrate 45 by Alessandro Penta, Italy, 2010, 35mm, 100'
	Istruzioni per essere felice by Elvio Annese, Italy, 2009, 35mm, 43'
	Ritratto di un Private Banker by Ricky Farina, Italia, 2009, MiniDV, 10'
	Ritratto di famiglia con badante by Alessandra Speciale, Italy, 2010, DVCam 51'
	Non c'è piùuna majorette a Villalba by Giuliano Ricci, Italy, 2010, 44'
	Notturno Stenopeico by Carlo Michele Schirinzi, Italy, 2010, DVCam, 8'
	La particella di Dio by LOGO, Italy, 2009, HDV, 30'
	Sposerò Nichi Vendola by Ricky Farina, Italy, 2010, 35mm, 13'

Work and crisis

	Fabbriche al buio by Giuliano Ricci, Italy, HD, 2010, 44'
	Il vincitore by Carlo Michele Schirinzi, Italy, 2010, MHD 8'
	Stato Privato by LOGO, Italy, 2009, 35mm, 30'
	TV by Ricky Farina, Italy, 2010, HD, 13'