AMANTEA – «Cinema has the power to unite people, to create dialogue and understanding. Our mission is to show the world that Calabria is much more than what is often represented in the media.”
These are words of Giulio Vita, creator and director of the La Guarimba Festival and subsequently of the Kino Guarimbo, the film residency that is becoming increasingly important and known not only on the national territory.
This evening, at 9pm on a free entry evening, there will be the final act of the Kino Guarimba, at the Terrenito di Amantea, in via Mazzini 32, where the short films produced and made in recent days will be screened.
These are all the works carried out in recent days, right in Amantea, for the ninth edition of the Kino Guarimba film residency, in which 50 directors, actors and audiovideo professionals from 28 different countries produced short films in the small center of the Tyrrhenian Sea of Cosenza . After the first days of training activities and cultural exchange, the participants began filming in the town, directly involving the inhabitants and exploring the natural and architectural beauties of the area.
«These projects are the result of the collaboration of people from different cultures, who bring their stories and personal experiences, generating ideas that will be concretized in an unprecedented collage of Calabria, told through the looks and perspectives of artists from all continents » declared Giulio Vita.
Giulio Vita is the charismatic founder of the La Guarimba film festival. The Calabrian-Venezuelan boy brought all his heart into the ambitious cultural rebirth project for Calabria. The Guarimba, held every year in Amantea, has become a beacon of hope and a point of reference for the local community, attracting artists, filmmakers and enthusiasts from all over the world. With his infectious energy and unconditional commitment, he transformed a small festival into a cultural movement.
Among the productions that developed during the residency, there is the short film directed by Sohail Dahdal, of Palestinian origin but resident in the United Arab Emirates, where he is a professor of Media Communication and Journalism at the American University of Sharjah. The director produced his project “With Love From Gaza”, involving local actors, to tell a story inspired by the war experiences lived in his homeland. Brazilian director Helena Azevedo de Castro, invited to Kino Guarimba with a scholarship awarded by the partners of the Residencia Acampadoc project, was captured by the ancient practices of traditional fishing in Amantea, and developed a documentary with interviews and testimonies from local fishermen.
As evidence of the variety of genres of the films that are shot during the residency, the Finnish Jere Ruuhiala, a professional editor, had his first directing experience with a horror film involving the Colombian actor Felipe Gomez Bonilla and the English actress Olivia Whittaker, who were transformed for the occasion by the Calabrian make-up artist Marika Martino.
Hungarian director Kata Incze involved one of the village gangs to shoot a dreamlike scene on the beach, also involving four local actors met during the popular casting organized by the residence.
The Italian-Algerian director Mounir Derbal also made five small Amantean actors the protagonists, who recited litanies and popular songs then sampled by the Finnish sound engineer Tommi Vieno and the Colombian editor Santiago Calle García: a film about memory and abandonment of the places, with shots in different points of the historic center.
