Ahead of the start of this year’s Torino Film Festival (November 24-December 2), one of Italy’s largest cinematic gatherings, BDE caught up with festival programmer Giulio Sangiorgio to talk through the event’s raison d’être, this year’s rich selection of documentary features and the current state of non-fiction production in Italy.
“So far, Torino has always been a festival focusing on youth. It was born as Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani [in Italian, ‘Youth International Film Festival’] in 1982. Over the years, we discovered many talented filmmakers through an international competition mostly showcasing first and second films, and through some sections dedicated to ‘map’ the frontiers and the boundaries of contemporary cinema. The festival is all about a young cinema both in terms of the age of the filmmakers, but also in terms of the freshness of their cinematic research,” Sangiorgio underlines.
“And yet, it’s a big fest for our city. There are big events involving the audience and spanning hosts like Christian Petzold, one of the most important directors of our times, to Drusilla Foer [an Italian entertainer and presenter best known for her TV work]. It’s a festival that tries to engage with as many types of audience as possible.”
Zooming in on the programming of docs, Sangiorgio highlights how over the past two years his team has worked on “radicalising” their research on new forms of documentary, which he defines as “a fertile ground for experimentation.”
“An interesting insight is that this year we’ve widened the Italian line-up with two more films. We’ve received so many interesting submissions. Generally speaking, for both our Italian and International doc competitions, we aimed to include films exploring boundaries with fiction, video art and experimental cinema. In other words, we pick films able to come up with new modes of filmmaking. That’s why here you won’t find – although we’ve got a couple of exceptions – TV-like docs boasting voice-over narration and talking heads.”
Among the highlights of the Italian documentary strand, Sangiorgio touches on Mauro Santini’s Le belle estati (a film developed in a high school, which brought a group of students to explore Cesare Pavese’s titular work), Andrea Gatopoulos’ A Stranger Quest (the portrait of an American map collector who ends up showcasing his maps on the digital environment offered by Second Life) and Riccardo Giacconi’s debut feature Giganti Rosse (which opens like a family archive-based film but then sees the director’s relatives speaking by quoting literary and philosophical sources).
Talking about the scouting process, Sangiorgio tells that international titles may be picked from other big festivals like FIDMarseille, Paris’ Cinema du Réel, Locarno and Rotterdam. In terms of the Italian docs, the festival asks producers for a world premiere or an international premiere. The Torino team carefully follows the filmmakers who have been under their lens for a while owing to their past work. Submissions, however, are still taken into account. “We receive many requests, since Torino is an important place for docs. Together with Festival dei Popoli, we’re the reference point for this type of cinematic language in Italy. However, the Festival dei Popoli’s audience is less focused on experimentation, and there one can find films that are bit more accessible, with themes and formats that are less radical. Of course, every city and every festival take a different path.”
Meanwhile, some of the standouts of the International Documentary competition are very intimate and deeply personal films such as Claire Simon’s Notre corps, Mariano Llinás’ Clorindo Testa and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts. Alongside these big names, Torino will screen the work of emerging filmmakers and newcomers. Sangiorgio mentioned in particular Luka Beradze’s Smiling Georgia, “a Karlovy Vary film where the director in a very ironic yet respectful fashion tells the story of a village where people took out their teeth hoping that one of the candidates running for President would have paid for their dentures.” He also mentioned Kumjana Novakova’s Silence of Reason, which he described as “a document film” wherein “the director tells the Serbians’ tortures on Bosnian women during the Yugoslav war by only showing archive photos and official paperwork.”
Towards the end of our conversation, we spoke about the current state of non-fiction production in Italy. “On the whole, in Italy we produce too many films. I’m also the editor-in-chief of a magazine which keeps track of the theatrical releases [FilmTV], and, as we’re nearing the end of the year, we’ll see quite some shocking things [at the box office] owing to tax credit [benefits].”
“That being said, I also programmed for the Milan-based fest Filmmaker, where there’s a section focusing on the works by Italian filmmakers aged under 35. Therefore, I’ve been seeing many young filmmakers growing over the years. They were making their first films all by themselves, with many ideas and little money. If we look things from this perspective, I can say Italian cinema is doing well. But, of course, it’s a very broad topic. Torino is not very industry-focused, and I don’t think this line-up includes the films which will scoop the Davide Di Donatello for Best Documentary [Italy’s national film awards]. They’re rather radical works. But I find this specific area [of docmaking] very vital, although it often doesn’t receive adequate support, and [screening at] Torino is a big achievement for these filmmakers. If we speak of more ‘industrialised’ productions, sporting strong themes and famous interviewees, then we’d be talking about TV-like formats, and there the production [landscape] is simply huge. After all, documentary is a mode rather than a genre.”
