Italia in doc: Italian Documentary Festival

Categories: Cinema
Date: 28/01/2019 to 01/02/2019
Time: 20 h 00 - 23 h 00
Location: Center for Fine Arts - BOZAR
Links: iCal - Google Calendar

With the journalist Paolo Rumiz and the directors: Alessandro Scilitani, Steve Della Casa, Chiara Ronchini

For its fourth edition, the ITALIA IN DOC festival, organized by the Instituto Italiano di Cultura of Brussels, will offer, as every year, a privileged observation point on the most recent Italian documentary production, while offering the public the opportunity to discover stories and characters composing a portrait of contemporary Italy.

Nine films are in competition, two prizes will be awarded: the public prize and the jury prize, chaired, as every year, by Jean Gili and composed for this fourth edition of Dominique Nasta (ULB) and Erik Martens (Vlaams Audiovisual Fund). Once again this year, the program opens with all the diversity of the voices of today’s Italian documentary, and it foresees numerous meetings with directors and producers. Documentaries auscultating society (the sea urchin fishermen of Il clan dei ricciai and the Sorelle d’Italia migrants) will alternate with those who propose a new reading of our more or less distant past (the Jewish community during the Italian colonization in Libya, and Italy of the 50’s bursting with dreams and hopes in Bulli e pupe). On the other hand, two films are devoted to two great figures of Italian cinema: Cesare Zavattini (Mondo Za) and Vittorio Gassman (Sono Gassman!).

Finally, others will share more intimate stories where the great History left a deep trace (the China of the 20s of L’uomo con la lanterna), or the future (the scientific community of CERN in Almost nothing / The Cern experience).

To inaugurate the Festival, Alla ricerca di Europa was chosen, a sailing trip between the Greek islands and Turkey, in search of the new European identity. The opening night will host a special guest, who is at the heart of this documentary, Paolo Rumiz.

BOZAR, STUDIO

• 8.00 pm Alla Ricerca di Europa (2018.64 ‘, IT) by Alessandro Scillitani
  

In the presence of di Paolo Rumiz and director Alessandro Scillitani

This film (“In Search of Europe”) is sailing, like Ulysses, in search of the heart of Europe, this continent that had an identity that began where Asia ends. Paolo Rumiz and Piero Tassinari travel from Beirut to Istanbul, from Rhodes to Kos, from Mykonos to Symi, from Syros to Athens, on the thread between the origins of a civilization that seems nowadays in disintegration, and the anxieties of the present. All this with the tragedy of migrants in the background, the Brexit fears on the horizon, the tensions of the Muslim world in the east, and the hordes of tourists in ambush. The mystery of what Europe is in the end remains untouched, except perhaps to meditate on the words of Euterpe, the patron saint of a restaurant behind the citadel of Rhodes: “Europe is everywhere and nowhere “.

• 21:30 Libia, ultimo esodo (2017, 65 ‘) by Ruggero Gabbai 

“Libya, the last exodus” tells what was once the thriving Jewish community of Libya and its capital Tripoli. Starting from the Italian colonization and reviewing the different foreign domination, the film describes the life of the Libyan Jews before their dispersion; a life lived alongside the Arab population, in a coexistence not without difficulties. It is in fact a very Italian story that belongs to our historical memory, evoked here by direct testimonies and unpublished archive images of the Instituto Luce.

Tickets can be bought here.

More info can be obtained on their website.