It’s not a coincidence the word swings between two opposing associations: on the positive end, it offers exotic escape, away from it all repose, while on the negative – a sense of forced seclusion, and disconnectedness from rest of the world.

The same duality we find in Giovanna Taviani’s latest and charming documentary I had the opportunity to catch last week at Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, a festival hosted by Lincoln Film Society in New York. In fact, the film’s original title explicitly expresses this duality: Fughe e approdi (Escapes and Shores).

But first, a bit of context: in order to fully appreciate this film, you need to know that the lead role in this film is marvelously played by the Aeolian islands (volcanic archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily). The islands serve the settings for both the personal story of the director, growing up in the island of Salina, and for myriad stories told by the islanders that hosted some of the most prominent cinematic gems shot there from early 40’s until the present. From this perspective, the film is truly an ode for the Aeolian islands and their remarkable cultural and political history.

Second, Giovanna Taviani, is the daughter of Vittorio Taviani of the famed Brothers Taviani and was featured as little girl in their masterpiece Kaos (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani -1984). So growing up in the island of Salina, being the daughter of, and participating in this iconic film – provide effective themes to weave the story of the Aeolian islands from a very personal perspective of a director that attempts, and in my opinion, succeeds in finding her own cinematic voice despite her privileged background.

And that’s tough.

Original boat and fisherman from Brothers Taviani’s 1984 Kaos
as a narrative bridge between space and time

Taviani demonstrates a skillful storytelling strategy by using several personal anchors such as personally narrating the film (almost as vocal diary), and the use of the original boat and fisherman Franco Figlio d’oro from Kaos. I especially liked the way Taviani is in fact taking the audience on a majestic voyage both in space: having the red sailed boat as scene connector, hopping from island to island – and time: the occasionally humorous interviews with the islanders and archive footage to bring historical and cinematic events to life.

Beyond the personal aspects, the film provides a highly educational review of some of the most important historical events associated with the islands such as the confinement and escape of anti-fascists Carlo Rosselli and Emilio Lussu from the island of Lipari and slew of cinematic masterpieces shot on the islands. From mid- 40’s, the pioneering work of Alliata, Maraini and Moncada who founded Panaria Film, historical production company that produced Italy’s first submarine documentaries, 1954’s Isole di fuoco (islands of Fire) by Vittorio De Seta – to more renowned films by Antonioni with “L’avventura”, Rossellini with 1950’s “Stromboli” featuring Ingrid Bergman on the island of Stromboli and the ensuing volcanic scandal of Anna Magnani, offended by Rossellini’s breaking up with her for Bergman, and as result shooting “Vulcano” on a nearby island; 1993’s Dear Diary (Caro diario) by Nanni Moretti and Massimo Troisi in 1993’s Il Postino – to name a few.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As I watched the film, I experienced this unique blend of the wildness of the islands with their volcanic eruptions and historic rough times they inflicted on islanders, but at the same time – the islands’ sheer and intoxicating beauty as magnet for the greatest Italian cinema directors. I guess, I am a little biased since I visited the Aeolian Islands exactly a year ago and the place is indeed beautifully inspiring: the conquer and perseverance of the human spirit over the forces of nature.

Taviani represents a new generation of documentarists that is not only charting her own path but also paving the road for other directors to follow and get exposure. As such Taviani ideated and is the artistic director of SalinaDocFest – an international documentary festival, that after reading the above – you can easily appreciate why it takes place on the island of Salina. I’d love to go back and attend the festival this coming September. We’ll see. But for now, I leave you with a wonderful interview i-Italy.org has recently conducted with Giovanna Taviani.

And as always, don’t take my word for it make it your own experience.

Carmelo and Rosuzza his wife reunited against the backdrop of Italian Unification events: individual vs. collective story lines.

Blasetti known for other historical epics, takes the opportunity to tell the story of Italy’s unification from a personal point of view of a Sicilian patriot named Carmelo (Giuseppe Gulino) on a mission to reach Garibaldi’s headquarters in Genoa and get his help to rescue Sicily from the occupying Spanish Bourbons and German mercenaries. On his way, Carmelo runs into various Italian characters representing different dialects and views regarding the boiling political climate.

The film predated the Neorealism genre that typically referred to as starting with Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta – Rome, Open City (1945). However, you can already see the genre’s key ingredients at play: usage of non-professional actors, movie shot on location, and description of social rough realities from a commoner point of view. Stylistically, this film is a far cry from Blasetti’s light-hearted 1954 Too Bad She’s Bad – Peccato che sia una Canaglia another precursor. This time, to Italian comedy (Commedia all’italiana) genre that formally started in 1958 with Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street – I Soliti Ignoti. Indeed, an interesting and prescient work evolution.

The camera movement takes a role of inquisitive “embedded journalist-like” that follows the events either as a follower of Carmelo on his journey, but also as an objective spectator of historical events such as the panoramic battlefield scenes. I especially liked the opening scene where you can see a close up behind window bars and then zooming out to reveal the context of a Sicilian village under rough Bourbon occupation – a simple, yet a powerful way to express the state of imprisonment.

The screening followed by panel discussion with Professors Alexander Stille and Stefano Albertini, and director Mario Martone. Here are a few pointers I found interesting:

• Director Mario Martone: His film Noi Credevamo – We Believed (2010) was also shown in the festival and provided a modern view of Risoregimento through the personal story of three friends joining activist Giuseppe Mazzini’s political movement (Giovine Italia) and the impact on their lives afterwards. Overall, there are not many films about Italy’s unification. Blasetti in this film is rather unique by explicitly conveying the brutality and physical rough aspects of the period, woven through a personal story. This technique makes the historical event more believable as viewers have tangible “real-life handles” to relate to.

• Prof. Albertini: The film is not about Garibaldi, in fact we don’t see him much throughout the film; only the facial reactions of soldiers listening to him speak. With that, Blasetti’s message is simple: The Risoregimento (Italy’s unification) was not about the larger than life leaders, it was about real people, with real stories that despite their cultural differences joined forces. This message of unity is interesting to examine against today’s Italian politics, where the separatist Northern League party for example refuses to celebrate the unification and sees it as a waste of money. Another difference, back in the 60’s Italians did not celebrate unification with flags, as it was frowned upon as radical, whereas in this year’s celebrations flags were widely used.

• Prof. Stille: Blasetti’s technique keeping Garibaldi’s role at a distance and focusing more on people around him processing his impact, was similarly adapted in Francesco Rosi 1962’s Salvatore Giuliano, the famous Sicilian gangster. It forces the viewers to conjure their own opinion about the renowned personality based on the impact of their emotional projection. The film also carries a gender element as Carmelo’s officer commands him not to move from his post to see his wife he hasn’t seen a month just a few miles away. The officer gives as an example Garibaldi who his wife had died, while he was away to reinforce Carmelo’s obedience and patriotism.

So as you can see this masterpiece has dual historical values: getting you introduced to an important chapter in Italy’s history, while at the same time experiencing initial ingredients of Neorealism – a cardinal chapter in Italy’s and the world’s cinematic history.

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I came early to get a close seat in the first rows. I am surrounded with young film students in their early twenties that are busy texting and convivially chatting away. In the back are sitting some older folks with serious expressions. Photographers are everywhere with their cameras at the ready, which builds up a tension as if a spaceship from Mars is about to land any second.

With the customary 15 minutes delay, Debora Young, the Festival director opens up with a few words of introduction after which Maestro Bellocchio is ushered onto the stage that in instant becomes a focal point of million camera flashes.

Master class with Marco Bellocchio

Interviewing Bellocchio is Dan Fainaru (Internal Communications) that poses wide range of questions about various milestones in his rich career. No English translation is provided, so I am glad all these years of Saturday Italian classes are effectively kicking in. Here are some insights I found the most interesting:

• Cinematic approach taken by young students: Bellocchio sees today’s young film students as very proficient in mastering the technical aspects of producing an effective soundtrack or solid camera angles, giving an example of the other day’s Short films shown or a typical reality TV shows that generated an audience-wide jeer. What they most lack of is a good script and a credible recital. He points out that in the Neorealism period, non-professional actors although used banal dialogs, they were extremely genuine as they reflected real people telling their own stories in their natural habitat.
• Dubbing: Bellocchio outlines two stages in the evolution of dubbing (i.e., use of professional voiceover artists instead of the actors’ own voice): 1) when he started out back in 1965 it was a common practice. In the case of I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket), it was rather a necessity as Lou Castel, the lead actor did not speak Italian fluently. He also gave an example of many directors including Fellini that shot scenes with complete dialogs only to change them entirely at the dubbing stage. 2) Around the 80’s he ditched dubbing, as it has become outdated practice no one considered valid anymore.
• Italian Cinema today: Bellocchio teaches classes in directorship and screenplay writing. Regarding global cinema, he points out that even back in the 50’s 3D movies were popular, they disappeared and now are back in vogue, referring to the other day’s opening of Toy Story 3 in the Teatro Greco (Greek Theater). He didn’t say it explicitly but I found it as an acknowledgment that these are all technology muscles, but with no soul. As for Italian cinema, he confessed that classic Italian cinema, namely Neorrealism, had to its advantage extremely tough economic post-war conditions as backdrop, which enabled to tell much more believable stories about human poverty, loss of job and other survival challenges. With the help of an audience member sitting at the front row he summed up a common quote that aptly summed up the current thinking:

“Italian cinema today is inferior to the sum of its parts”

I do hope we won’t need another war to improve quality, as I believe there are great contemporary gems from Tornatore, Ozpetek, Salvatores, Sorrentino, Solidini and many others that brought forward new directions and perspectives in tune with the times. That said, it was a bit unsettling when I stopped at a local DVD store and the only titles for sale were American blockbusters. It could be a coincidence or cold business sense but still telling.

Just arrived yesterday to charming Taormina, aptly named because it’s perched royally on mount Tauro overlooking mount Etna. The town is not packed as I was initially afraid of but contains a healthy dose of tourists that happily savor the holy trinity: pasta-espresso-ice cream.

I decided to kick off the festival with the short films contest sponsored by New Italian Cinema Events (N.I.C.E), showcasing Sicilian cinema as an optimal way to get the local cultural sensibilities.

Here are some of my favorites, which illustrates that a rich story can easily be captured under 12 minutes:

Sunnyside (Ivano Fachin – 6′)
The film, shot in black and white depicts the grim daily grind of a corporate rat in… Manhattan (!?). I was hoping to see the Sicilian version… regardless the film is able to bring about a sense of daily work routine by using repetitive activities of the actor; drinking coffee, typing away in his office etc. with no heard dialogs – only intimate guitar soundtrack that shares space with the sounds of the big city. When the protagonist decides one day to wear a red clown nose firing smiles wherever he goes the people seem initially not to respond. It’s only when he gives up on this “be happy” strategy that reality changes but without him noticing. Think about it the next time you wait for an email reply that hasn’t arrived just yet. It’s just that people have other agendas and most likely it is not personal.

The Tomato – Il Pomodoro (Alessio Angelico – 9′)
If the previous film dealt with the grim side of life, this film literally lit up the screening room due to its comic and clever screenplay. Using a tried-and-true plot strategy of marrying unlikely combinations: a tomato falls out of the grocery bag of a light switch salesman, a seemingly trivial event, gets mushroomed into a Kafkian tail of bureaucratic nightmare. The poor guy needs to fill out official applications to remove the tomato from his doorstep as if it’s a public hazard. Inspectors are coming and measuring the shriveling tomato that by the day loses its original maturity when dropped, thus creating a vicious cycle of comic parody. I liked the choice of the tomato, as the object of contention, that on one hand puts the film on a sci-fi mode of an Italian society that like the sacred cows of India – evolved into complete veneration of the tomato with dead serious processes and at the same time the immense ridicule seeing it though realistic eyes.

Rec Stop Play (Emanuele Pisano – 11′)
The film weaves together 4 stories: a father tending to his comatose child, a prisoner on parole receiving love letters from a customer in a launderette where she works, a casual dialog of two passersby and a common thread of a guy that records all these dialogs only to play them back to a puppet in his garden. The message at the end of the film states: “communication conquers all barriers.” I saw a different Pirandellian message: what you see is never what it seems. Especially since the plotline uses brief shots to conjure specific assumptions and then reveal the opposite intent.

Self-Portrait – Autoritratto (Antonio Emanuele – 8′)
A frustrated painter is experiencing a radical case of creative bloc to the point his girlfriend leaves him and he’s left alone with a blank canvas that is mockingly staring at him in his shabby apartment. The photography and the facial expressions of the struggling actor that tries variety of tactics to compel the canvas into obedience – turns the canvas into a relentless adversary. It sure made me think about how hard sometimes the first stroke could be, carrying this imaginary heavy weight of self-criticism, where in fact all you need is really to take the plunge and let your first idea lead you to the second, third and Nth ideas that typically just hide under that blank page. Ideas are like a social network in your brain and can easily get viral, you just need to post the first comment…