Scotland’s annual showcase of Italian cinema returns with a diverse selection of some of the best films of the past twelve months. As ever, the Italian Film Festival celebrates the work of both established auteurs as well as emerging directors and this year’s programme takes audiences from Rome to Calabria, Trieste to Sicily, Sardinia to Naples. There’s family dramas, atmospheric noirs, dazzling comic book adventures, neo-westerns, historical biopics, offbeat fables and much more. Most of the titles are either UK or Scottish premieres, including the opening film, Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco.

The retrospective screenings include a tribute to the late Italian film icon Monica Vitti and a centenary celebration of the great political filmmaker Francesco Rosi. The Italian Film Festival is programmed by Dr Pasquale Iannone – who will introduce selected screenings – and is supported by Creative Scotland and the Italian Institute of Culture.

Schedule:

Fri 20th May 20.30 – The Hole

Sat 21st May 17.45 – The Miracle Child

Sat 21st May 20.15 – The King of Laughter

Sun 22nd May 15.15, Thu 26th May 20.30 – The Hidden Child

Sun 22nd May 20.30 – Jealousy, Italian Style

Mon 23rd May 18.15 – The Peacock’s Paradise

Tue 24th May 20.30 – The Girl Has Flown

Wed 25th May 18.10 – The Giants

Wed 25th May 20.40 – A Chiara

Fri 27th May 20.30 – Blue Eyes

Mon 28th May 17.50 – Futura

Sat 28th May 20.15 – Diabolik

Sun 29th May 17.50 – Marx Can Wait

Sun 29th May 20.15 – Salvatore Giuliano

ABOUT THE FILMS

A Chiara

Jonas Carpignano concludes his trilogy set in the Calabrian town of Gioia Tauro with an engrossing character study. Swamy Rotolo plays Chiara, a 15 year old who finds out some uncomfortable truths about the family patriarch (played by Rotolo’s real-life father, Claudio). While a stand-alone film, A Chiara touches on many of the same themes from the previous two entries in Carpignano’s trilogy, including the ever-present shadow of organised crime and the tensions between indigenous Calabrians and the immigrant community.

Blue Eyes

Treviso-born actress Michela Cescon (Vincere, The Girl in the Fog) makes her feature debut as director with a lean, atmospheric thriller she’s described as an homage to the noirs of Jean-Pierre Melville. Blue Eyes stars two icons of European cinema Valeria Golino (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) and Jean-Hugues Anglade (Betty Blue). Golino plays an enigmatic, methodical thief who’s pursued by Ivano De Matteo’s police commissioner across a moody, nocturnal Rome. Anglade plays a retired French cop called in to help with the investigation.

Diabolik

The wildly popular Diabolik series of comics was the creation of sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani and was first published in 1962. It follows the masked master criminal of the title and his partner, the equally iconic Eva Kant. The first film version – directed by Mario Bava – was released back in 1968. After more than five decades, Marco and Antonio Manetti deliver an irresistibly stylish 21st century update, with Luca Marinelli (Martin Eden) and Miriam Leone (Sweet Dreams) in the lead roles.

Futura

With echoes of 1964 documentary Love Meetings – in which filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled across the country to gather opinions from fellow Italians on questions of love, sex and gender – Futura sees Alice Rohrwacher (Happy As Lazzaro), Francesco Munzi (Black Souls) and Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden) make their way up and down the peninsula (taking in beaches, gyms, farms, universities and various other settings) to conduct interviews with a cross-section of young Italians.

Jealousy, Italian Style

Although the late Italian star Monica Vitti was best known for her dramatic performances in the 1960s modernist masterpieces of Michelangelo Antonioni such as L’Avventura, she was equally accomplished in comedy. In Ettore Scola’s dazzlingly inventive, endearingly scruffy satire, she plays Adelaide, a Rome flower seller caught between two equally eccentric suitors, played by fellow Italian acting royalty Marcello Mastroianni (La Dolce Vita, 8 ½) and Giancarlo Giannini (Seven Beauties, Casino Royale)

This screening includes an in-person introduction from the festival’s programmer Dr Pasquale Iannone.

Marx Can Wait

Marco Bellocchio’s first film Fists in the Pocket – a still eye-poppingly subversive chronicle of family dysfunction – was made when the director was in his mid-twenties and remains one of Italian cinema’s most explosive debuts. In many of Bellocchio’s fiction films of the subsequent five decades, families in all their many forms have remained a consistent theme. With the documentary Marx Can Wait, he turns the focus to his own in a powerful exploration of his twin brother Camillo’s suicide in 1968.

Salvatore Giuliano

Masterly docu-drama about the notorious Sicilian bandit, told in a series of flashbacks, from the discovery of his bullet-riddled body to the trial of his associates. Never has Sicilian society and the politics of the Mafia been laid out with such clarity. Stunningly shot in stark black and white by Gianni Di Venanzo.

This screening includes an in-person introduction from the festival’s programmer Dr Pasquale Iannone.

The Giants

The third feature from Sardinian auteur Bonifacio Angius, The Giants boldly fuses the sweat-drenched wide-screen visuals of 60’s spaghetti westerns with elements of Marco Ferreri’s controversial 1973 film La grande bouffe. As well as serving as director, producer and cinematographer, Angius co-stars as one of a group of male friends who gather at an isolated house on the outskirts of Sassari. Suffused with a tangible sense of unease, The Giants is a blackly comic take on Italian masculinity in crisis.

This screening includes an in-person introduction from the festival’s programmer Dr Pasquale Iannone.

The Girl Has Flown

Set in Trieste, The Girl Has Flown is the fifth feature from Wilma Labate, written in collaboration with writer-director siblings Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo. The film follows sixteen-year-old Nadia (Alma Noce) and the aftermath of a traumatising encounter with Brando (Luka Zunic). While other recent works by women filmmakers such as Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge or Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman have approached similar subject matter through heightened stylisation, Labate’s approach echoes Robert Bresson’s Mouchette in its quietly devastating restraint. Please note that his film contains a scene of sexual violence.

The Hidden Child

With its story of a cultured professor forced out of reclusion after providing refuge for a wayward youth, The Hidden Child recalls Luchino Visconti’s 1974 drama Conversation Piece. Like that film, Roberto Andò’s adaptation of his own novel takes place mostly in interiors. Set in Naples, it sees piano teacher Gabriele (Silvio Orlando) take in Ciro (Giuseppe Pirozzi), a street-wise 10 year old who’s on the run after he was involved in an incident which hospitalised the mother of a local mob boss.

The Hole

Although he has only made two features, Milan-born filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino has established himself as a unique voice in world cinema. Driven by an endless curiosity about the Italian landscape, his films are quiet, unhurried, utterly absorbing big screen experiences. Set in 1961, at a time when Italy’s economic miracle was in full flow in the industrial north, Frammartino’s third film focuses on a group of young speleologists who explore a vast cave in the southern region of Calabria.

This screening includes an in-person introduction from the festival’s programmer Dr Pasquale Iannone.

The King of Laughter

Nominated in no fewer than 14 categories in the 2022 David di Donatello Awards (the Italian Oscars) Mario Martone’s ambitious biopic of actor and playwright Eduardo Scarpetta features a typically charismatic central performance by Toni Servillo (Il Divo, The Great Beauty). Set in Naples in the early 1900s, The King of Laughter chronicles the colourful personal and professional life of Scarpetta, whose children included Eduardo, Peppino and Titina De Filippo, 20th century Italian theatre’s most celebrated siblings.

This screening includes an in-person introduction from the festival’s programmer Dr Pasquale Iannone.

The Miracle Child

Silvia Brunelli’s The Miracle Child is based loosely on Vincenzo Restivo’s eponymous novel and tells of nine year old Annaluce (Sofia Guastaferro) who, much to the astonishment of her working class Neapolitan neighbourhood, one day finds she is able to perform miracles. The film chronicles the impact Annaluce’s ‘gift’ has on the community and her own family, including big brother Lino (Francesco Pellegrino). Brunelli’s micro-budget feature is a thoroughly modern fairytale and an assured, offbeat debut.

The Peacock’s Paradise

A family is reunited for a celebration during which secrets are steadily unearthed – it’s a conceit familiar from films as diverse as Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, Ben Wheatley’s Happy New Year, Colin Burstead or Lulu Wang’s The Farewell. Yet writer-director Laura Bispuri gives it an unusual twist in her third feature. French cinema icon Dominque Sanda (The Conformist, 1900) plays matriarch Nena, who on the occasion of her birthday welcomes her adult children and grandchildren back to her seaside home.