Two palindrome dates open and close, 12 and 21 April, the 37th edition of Bolzano Film Festival which will transform the South Tyrolean capital into a small Cannes.
The program
The rich programme, ten days and two weekendskicks off on Friday 12 April with the screening of Blind Husbands, a silent film by Erich von Stroheim, on the opening night which will simultaneously occupy the three theaters of the FilmClub in via Dr Streiter in Bolzano. The film will be presented in a restored version with new live musical accompaniment, in collaboration with the Südtirol Jazz Festival. The series of events will instead be closed on Saturday 21 April by the animated masterpiece Linda and the Chicken Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbachbest film awarded at the Annecy Animation Festival.
Screenings for all tastes
In the middle, a dense billboard with screenings for all tastes – program and times on filmfestival.bz.it – and thematic focuses dedicated to the two lifetime achievement awards, awarded to the directors Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi and to the production company Vivo film of Marta Donzelli and Gregorio Paonessa, but also to Brazilian Indigenous Cinema with militant productions of political-cultural resistance and civil commitment, and the homage to the South Tyrolean producer and director Karl «Baumi» Baumgartner, who passed away ten years ago. Minorities, languages and conflicts are recurring contents in the Bffb37 Competition as well as in the RealeNonReale section dedicated to documentary forms. In the Bffb Special section, Pepe, Silver Bear at the last Berlinale, presented in Italian preview, with which Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias gives voice to the dead hippopotamus of the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar to tell the historical events of which he was a witness. What will catalyze attention will be, as always, the selection of films in competition which in this 37th edition condense «a surprising hybrid universe – as the director Vincenzo Bugno anticipates -. Fiction, animation, different documentary forms: all works with a strong and original artistic profile and a feeling of intimacy that makes us feel close, beyond the diversity of stories and places, existences, bodies and characters. None of this film leaves us indifferent.” This year too the event is enriched by the Small Languages sections, dedicated to linguistic minorities and Local Heroes, with which the Bolzano Film Festival gives space to young filmmakers of the region with stories that talk about border experiences developed with small budgets or produced thanks to the support of the Idm Film Fund Commission. Südsee by Henrika Küll starts from the friendship between two boys to investigate the complexity of the relationship between Germany, Jewish world and Israel. Among the most anticipated feature films, the Swiss film Deer Girl by Francesco Jost and the Austrian Persona non grata by Antonin Svoboda.
The woman’s body
The works presented in events are very often signed feminine or they see the woman’s body at the center of the narrative. «The programming of the festival, on a thematic level, is certainly feminine – confirms Bugno -. A good part of the works in the program are by female directors and there is a focus on the body at various levels. This is the case of two German films, Ivo by Eva Trobisch and Touched by Claudia Rorarius, in competition last year at the Locarno festival and making its national premiere here. Female body also protagonist of one of the films included in the RealeNonReale section, Waiting time by Claudia Brignone dedicated to pregnancy, through the story-portrait of a fascinating Neapolitan midwife. Women at the center of Leave me alone, a Swiss production in French Maxime Rappaz, and Mit einem Tiger schlafen by Anja Salomonowitzbiography of the Austrian artist Maria Lassning».
