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N.I.C.E. - New Italian Cinema Festival
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April 08-13
Illuzion 
N.I.C.E., or New Italian Cinema Festival, will start on 8th of April in Moscow. The festival will traditionally present to Muscovites and the guests of the city the most interesting works by Italian directors over the past years. The films selected for the festival reflect evolution of contemporary Italian cinema in different genres: comedies, dramas, thrillers, animation. The festival will start with a movie Sei Mai Stata Sulla Luna? by Paolo Genovese.
The audience will have an opportunity to share opinions and discuss the works with the authors and participants of the movies. Among the guests of the festival are the following: director Rossella De Venuto (Controra); an Italian director and writer Paolo Genovese, known for Tutta Colpa de Freud (2014), Una Famiglia Perfetta (2012) and Immaturi (2011); actress Sabrina Impacciatore (Sei Mai Stata Sulla Luna?) who made her film debut in 1999, in Francesco Maselli's Il compagno, in 2007 she was nominated to David di Donatello for Best Supporting Actress thanks to her performance in Paolo Virzì's Napoleon and Me, and one year later she received a second nomination to the same award for Wilma Labate's Miss F; director Alessandro Lunardelli (Il Mondo Fino in Fondo), director Antonio Morabito (Il Venditore di Medicine), and actor and director Rolando Rovello (Ti Ricordi di Me?).
Films are shown in Italian, English, German, French, Arabic with Russian subtitles. The festival will be conducted by Italian Institute of Culture in Moscow, Illusion Cinema, CoolConnections supported by the Embassy of Italy in Moscow.
Films:
 Tutta Colpa di Freud. Comedy. Italy 2014, 120 min. Directed by Paolo Genovese. Starring: Marco Giallini, Vittoria Puccini, Anna Foglietta, Vinicio Marchioni, Laura Adriani. In Italian, English with Russian subtitles. Awards and festivals: Golden Ciak Award - Best Song; Busto Arsizio Film Festival - Best Actress, Best Actor; David di Donatello Award Nomination - Best Suporting Actress; Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Award Nomination - Best Comedy, Best Supporting Actress, Best Song, Best Casting. Francesco Taramelli is a psychoanalyst who is dealing with three patients going through various hurdles in their love lives: Marta is chasing a deaf-mute man who has stolen things from her book shop, Sara is a lesbian who was left by her girlfriend just after she proposed to her, and 18-year-old Emma is seeing a 50-year-old architect called Alessandro, who is already married. Unfortunately, these three patients are Francesco's three beloved daughters.
Border. Drama. Italy 2013, 95 min. Directed by Alessio Cremonini. Starring: Dania Keilani, Sara El Debuch, Wasim Abo Azan, Sami Haddad, Abdul Ahmed. In Arabic with Russian subtitles. Awards and festivals: Italian Golden Globe Award Nomination - Best First Feature, Rome International Film Festival - AITS Award. Fatima and her sister Aya are visited by a man who claims that Fatima's soldier husband will desert the Syrian army in two days to join the freedom fighters and that the sisters should leave at once for Turkey. This is necessary to avoid their possible kidnapping by the Secret Service that would force Fatima's husband to abandon the rebel army. Though the siblings initially hesitate, they soon find themselves on the road with an unwilling male companion, who picks up a mysterious male stranger who’s also headed for the border.
 Viva la Libertà. Comedy / Drama. Italy 2013, 94 min. Directed by Roberto Andò. Starring: Toni Servillo, Valerio Mastandrea, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Michela Cescon, Gianrico Tedeschi. In Italian, French, German with Russian subtitles. Awards and festivals: David di Donatello Award - Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay; Italian Film Journalists' Syndicate Award - Best Screenplay, Special Silver Ribbon Award; Chicago International Film Festival - participation; Karlovy Vary International Film Festival - participation; Italian Golden Globe Award nomination - Best Director, Best Screenplay. Viva la Libertà is a 2013 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Roberto Andò. It won the Nastro d'Argento for Best Screenplay and the David di Donatello for Best Script and the David di Donatello for Best Supporting Actor to Valerio Mastandrea. Enrico Oliveri is a shrewd, experienced politician, a senator and party leader of the center-left whose career is in decline. His party is currently in opposition and by all projections is headed for another defeat in the upcoming elections. Members of his party want to dump him. Suffering depression and exhaustion, he decides to disappear for a while, hiding incognito in Paris, France at the home of a former lover, Danielle, who is now married to a famous film director by whom she has a school-age daughter. Panic ensues among Oliveri's political intimates when they discover his disappearance. His right-hand man, Andrea Bottini, does not lose faith, but instead gets the idea of secretly substituting Oliveri's twin brother, Giovanni Ernani, an over-the-top writer and philosopher who has previously spent time in mental health care and is still medicated. Complications ensue, but the substitute proves more outgoing, more visionary, and much more popular with the press, the public and even with his competitors than his more serious brother, and he leads the party towards victory. The real senator rediscovers himself while watching his brother's success from afar through the French newspapers as he himself dallies in the arms of lovers. Enrico Oliveri eventually returns to Rome. But does he resume his life, or is his mad brother left in charge? The film ends in ambiguity.
Controra. Thriller. Italy, Ireland 2014, 85 min. Directed by Rossella De Venuto. Starring: Fiona Glascott, Pietro Ragusa, Federico Castelluccio, Marcello Prayer, Ray Lovelock. In English, Italian, German with Russian subtitles. Awards and festivals: Neuchâtel International Fantasy Film Festival - participation. House of Shadows, titled Controra in Italy, is a supernatural thriller film written and directed by Rossella de Venuto. The film, De Venuto's directorial debut, is an Italian-Irish co-production written in English, Italian, and German. An almost completed rough cut premiered on 10 July 2013 at the 25th Galway Film Fleadh the film was finished in 2014 and premiered at the International Bifest in Bari and was released in Italian theaters on 5 June 2014. It stars the Irish actress Fiona Glascott, who plays Megan, an Irish artist investigating a secret hidden in the family house of her Italian husband Leo. De Venuto came up with the idea for the movie as a little girl. Born in Trentino in north Italy, she used to spend her summer holidays in Apulia. She was fascinated by the old stories and legends told about the controra to prevent the children from going out during that time. She states: "Controra is a term used in southern Italy to indicate a precise moment of the day: it is the early afternoon, the hour when the shadows of the dead appear to contact the living. For this reason, right after lunch, local people close themselves at home to rest. It is very warm, crickets sing and streets are desert. After having experienced this and having heard the scary stories by locals, I wanted to learn more and I found that there was an extensive literature about these believes. These start already in the Greek mythology, and are maintained alive in the existing popular culture and have been well investigated by contemporary researchers such as Roger Caillois with his illuminating book Les Démon de Midi." De Venuto was influenced by Italian horror movies from the 1970s and the 1980s such as Pupi Avati's The House with Laughing Windows, as well as Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Alejandro Amenabar's The Others, and Hideo Nakata's Ring. The movie combines a Gothic Mediterranean setting and local myths with themes like the strict code of silence of the typical Italian family of the 1940's and of the Catholic church, and subverts genre expectations by setting a horror story.
Il Mondo Fino in Fondo. Comedy / Drama. Italy 2013, 95 min. Directed by Alessandro Lunardelli. Starring: Filippo Scicchitano, Luca Marinelli, Barbora Bobulova, Camilla Filippi, Alfredo Castro. In Italian, Spanish with Russian subtitles. Davide and Loris are brothers and live in a very small village in the north of Italy. While Davide is eighteen years old and gay, Loris is almost thirty and don't know anything about his brother's sexuality. Loris and Davide go to Barcelona to watch the match of "Inter". In Spain, Davide falls in love with Andy, an Ecology Activist from Chile. Andy invites Davide to go with him to Santiago and the boy follows him. Far from the provincialism of his city, things don’t go as Davide imagined.
 Il Venditore di Medicine. Drama. Italy, France 2013, 105 min. Directed by Antonio Morabito. Starring: Claudio Santamaria, Isabella Ferrari, Evita Ciri, Marco Travaglio, Roberto De Francesco. In Italian with Russian subtitles. Awards and festivals: Bari International Film Festival - Best Original Story; Tirana International Film Festival - Best Film, Best Screenplay; Italan Film Journalists' Syndicate Award Nomination - Best Original Story. Focusing on a 40-year-old sales rep, Bruno, who suffers unbearable pressure at the hands of his tyrannical boss, the film begins by revealing just how stressful the job is when a co-worker commits suicide after being lambasted during a meeting. Next we follow Bruno as he makes his rounds to various pharmacies and doctor's offices, which he showers with free iPads and trips abroad in exchange for the promise that they’ll push his company Zafer's latest product.
L'arte Della Felicità. Animation / Drama. Italy 2013, 82 min. Directed by Alessandro Rak. Starring: Leandro Amato, Nando Paone, Renato Carpentieri, Jun Ichikawa, Lucio Allocca. In Italian, English, Neapolitan with Russian subtitles. Awards and festivals: Venice Film Festival - Special Mention, Young Cinema Award; European Film Award - Best Animated Film; Italian Film Journalists' Syndicate Award Nomination - Best Song; David di Donatello Award Nomination - Best Song; Annecy International Film Festival - participation. A taxi driver who lives in Napoli spend his time on his uncle's car thinking about happiness. His former brother took a road for happiness practicing Buddhism while he is always sad and melancholic. He listens to a radioshow called the art of happiness as a remembering idea of what is the goal of life. Do we have just one life or are we living again and again forever?
Sei Mai Stata Sulla Luna? Comedy. Italy 2015, 90 min. Directed by Paolo Genovese. Starring: Raoul Bova, Liz Solari, Nino Frassica, Sabrina Impacciatore, Neri Marcorè. In Italian with Russian subtitles. Renzo is a charming farmer, who's rational and practical. He meets Guia, the elegant journalist of a prestigious fashion magazine, when she discovers that she has inherited a farm in a remote village of Apulia. Naturally, opposites attract, and between city and countryside, the two different lifestyles come face to face, in an engaging carousel in which Guia's tax-adviser boyfriend and his frantic assistant will find themselves faced with the colourful characters of this village in Apulia.
 Ti Ricordi di Me? Comedy. Italy 2014, 91 min. Directed by Rolando Ravello. Starring: Ambra Angiolini, Edoardo Leo, Paolo Calabresi, Susy Laude, Pia Engleberth. In Italian with Russian subtitles. Awards and festivals: Italian Film Journalists' Syndicate Award - Best Actor. Ti Ricordi di Me?, the second film by Rolando Ravello, starts with the classic line "once upon a time there was a prince and a princess." The rest of the film lives up to the start: a modern fairy tale, full of humour, in which characters Bea (Ambra Angiolini) and Roberto (Edoardo Leo) meet in front of a psychoanalyst's door where they have headed for their various disturbances: she is narcoleptic, he is kleptomaniac. An uneasy love story because Bea has random memory losses and constantly restarts her life to the extent that she carries a large notebook around in which she writes everything down. Written by Paolo Genovese and Edoardo Falcone based on an idea by Massimiliano Bruno, Ti Ricordi di Me? was produced by Marco Belardi. The latter was the one to ask Ravello to be the director: "I accepted and I went ahead instinctively. I trusted my instinct more than I did my rationality."
Una Piccola Impresa Meridionale. Comedy. Italy 2013, 103 min. Directed by Rocco Papaleo. Starring: Rocco Papaleo, Riccardo Scamarcio, Barbora Bobulova, Sarah Felberbaum, Claudia Potenza. In Italian with Russian subtitles. Awards and festivals: David di Donatello Award Nomination - Best Song, Golden Ciak Award Nomination - Best Song, Italian Film Journalists' Syndicate Award - Best Supporting Actress. Mamma Stella is on edge. As if she hadn't got enough trouble already with her daughter Rosa Maria, who has left her husband now Costantino, her son, has disrobed. Afraid to be the talk of the village, relegates him to a distant lighthouse belonging to the family. But Costantino does not remain far from the madding crowd for long. It does not take long indeed before all the local (or even distant) outcasts flock together there: Magnolia, a retired escort girl; Arturo, Rosa Maria's estranged husband; Valbona, a lesbian; Rosa Maria herself; and, to crown it all, two eccentric workers accompanied by a little girl... After a period of chaos, this small world gradually discovers that unity makes strength.
Schedule:
April 08, Wednesday
19:30 - Sei Mai Stata Sulla Luna? Q&A: Sabrina Impacciatore
April 09, Thursday
19:00 - Tutta Colpa di Freud. Q&A: Paolo Genovese
22:00 - Ti Ricordi di Me? Q&A: Rolando Rovello
April 10, Friday
19:00 - Il Venditore di Medicine. Q&A: Antonio Morabito
22:00 - L'arte Della Felicità
April 11, Saturday
16:00 - Tutta Colpa di Freud
18:30 - Controra. Q&A: Rossella De Venuto
21:00 - Una Piccola Impresa Meridionale
April 12, Sunday
17:00 - Ti Ricordi di Me?
19:00 - Il Mondo Fino in Fondo. Q&A: Alessandro Lunardelli
21:30 - Una Piccola Impresa Meridionale
April 13, Monday
19:00 - Border
21:30 - Viva La Libertà
More info
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