The festival was held at Greenbelt 3, Makati City, featuring a slew of Italian movies, mostly new, and including tributes to Italian masters Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, and the Philippines’ own Brillante Mendoza.
During the press conference, one media person observed that European films, including Italian movies, tended to be bleak and pessimistic (“all those haunted characters”), and was this reflective of European society and problems like the debt crisis?
Director-writer Stefania Cassini immediately countered this: “That’s not true. There’s a lot of comedy, we laugh a lot at ourselves. In fact, because of the economic situation, there’s an increase in comedy, something lighter, to escape reality.”
Singer-actress Pietra Montecorvino, who ended the press con by belting out, upon request, a Neapolitan song, had a different perspective: “Art is depressing because depression is part of life. If you’re depressed, you’re closer to art, closer to death…”
Points of view
Actor Ennio Fantastichini said it was always a pleasure to watch a film with a different culture. So the film should be watched from the point of view of your culture.
He added that Italian cinema “has many points of view. Sometimes the market is more powerful than the culture. So, our movies are a different way of looking at reality. In the future, I hope for more balance between comedy and drama.”
Producer-essayist Carlo Macchitella provided another broad picture by relating cinema to history: “A country without a memory is a country without a future. The strength of the memory of the past is a challenge…”
One of the organizers of the filmfest, Italian Senator Goffredo Bettini, remarked that Italian cinema today “has a new energy, new motivation, with a new market and new talents. And the reason we chose the Philippines is that it has a strong tradition in cinema.”
In terms of cinema, Cassini concluded, “Asia is the continent to watch.”
