ST. ALi Italian Film Festival 2021
Palace Cinemas
27 October to Sunday, 21 November
Sydney, Australia
There are quite a few film festivals that are being held on terra australis on an annual basis, however, the Italian Film Festival is never not a highlight, which is partly due to the fact that it constitutes the biggest ode to Italian films outside the confines of Italy. The other contributing factor is that it was founded by Cav. Antonio Zeccola who single-handedly planted the seed to create the foundation for Australia’s unrivalled national boutique cinema conglomerate to grow. Given that a film festival could not ask for a better environment than the Palace Cinemas might be one of the many facets that makes attending the festival a pleasure, however, the curation of the high standard of film submissions really brings up its value and the message it sends to its audience.
With contemporary and classic Italian cinema being the obvious common denominator, each incarnation of the Italian Film Fest offers something new and unexpected, which makes the festival a resounding success.
The Opening Night of the 2021 incarnation of the Italian Film Fest was graced with an Australian premiere, i.e. a new drama charting the lives of a middle-class Italian family from the early 1980s to the current day. Daniele Luchetti’s The Ties is centred around an infidelity, around which the emotional picture spins its yarn and sheds its idiosyncratic light on age-old relationship conflicts.
A personal highlight of this year’s festival was Fellini Forward: From The Creative Genius Of Federico Fellini.
Having only recently premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and based on an experiment using artificial intelligence, the personal and highly idiosyncratic artistic approach Fellini channelled his alchemy in creating a truly unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire is being transported into our day and age.
A truly "Felliniesque" experience in terms of extravagant, baroque images being (re-)animated to tell a metaphorical story illustrating the evolution of a maestro in the cinema world and a boundary pushing project in terms of reviving the legacy of a genre-coining artist.
In many aspects, Fellini Forward perfectly encapsulates the DNA of the Italian Film Festival ( www.italianfilmfestival.com.au ), i.e. bridging classic and contemporary Italian cinema.
