Loredana Rotundo, jury member|| Daniele Riba, organization manager || Gino Picaro, author of Arena ||Cinzia Minchella, public
About the Festival
This Festival is beatutiful beacause you can see and listen to thoughts (I mean ideas, obsessions, world’s visions, calls for waking the consciusness) that are completely different from the industrial artistic and commercial works selected for official spaces. For official spaces I mean big (and, maybe, also little) festivals and pubblic and private mass media, which work for enrich their corporative system with the cesorship (the ideas are cut and packaged for the market) and with works thar are technically perfect, but unrealizable if there’s not the money of a corrupted economical/commercial/financia system.
Here public and authors are free to meet each others with ideas that call us to the real and flowing life, that one that is around us and that nobody knows because of the media system’s obscurantism, a violent and omnipreset media system that control every aspect of human and social activities. Against this system we can listen anywhere the voice of society: equus marketing, critical consumes, buying food directely from farmer’s hand, iniziatives that aim to create a new, honest human and professional network (such as this Festival does).
Few pubblic. It’s best. The shouting and disumanized foolies of the mediatical system, are in Maximum Circus to celebrate rotten balls (naturally, I exclude from this bad description the real football-fans). So it’s comforting, in spite of the haughtiness of relationships based on power that existes anywhere, to see people that meet theirselves on the first floor of a building in Esquilino’s square, to watch a screen (also with some difficulties). It can bring you in a better human condition, where the serene debate between people of every kind is possible, people that was colled there for judice the works projected (I’d like to give my compliments to the artistic director for the professional variety of the jury), but also managers who organize the festival, authors, public. Here is just the beginning of a new concept of space: the small against the big one; the universal themes, discovered through other points of view, lived and discussed in the group; the renewed human relationships; the critic thought against the asleepment; the understatement during work presentation against the conceited exibition of big productions.
It’s a happy and serene glocal dimension. Maybe involuntarily, but in a interesting way the festival had take the direction of taking off he mask of the empty powers.
About the films
Vito's way
There is no psychological study of the character, the continous repetition of his act, walk with his stick, continously calling his dog friends, doesn’t show the aim of his walking. Despite of any critic, it’s a short film that has a big personality.
Il colore del silenzio [The colour of silence]
We appreciated the theme chosen, but we were also tired by the strong teaching aim and the direction weakness. Very bad quality of sound.
Quelli di via Artom
[Those from Artom Road]
Good idea and realization. The recollected testimonies, the theme chosen, the medium technique and the direction of this documentary could be confronted to professional works. It’s the best documentary of the Festival.
17 e 30 [Half past five p.m.]
Very good direction, edition and sound. Good actors. The public is asolutely swept up by the slaughter game of the protagonists, people can just stay imobilized by this real-visionary assault, but it doesn’t bring to any goal.
Quando le mucche vanno in vacanza
[When cows go on holiday]
Interesting and well done. Rich of historical and social value.
Viaggio in Sicilia [Travel in Sicily]
It does not realize the sequence of the travel’s stages, but it is lost in any places such as the editor used the refused frames, and not the good ones.
E’ la fine
[It's the end]
Fun and genial word game.
L’impresa [The enterprise]
Fun, it has clear, but not really original ideas, but it’s too long: the need to put on it all the comic situation that were shooted, steals its strenght.
About the Festival
I just don’t remember the way in which the idea of the Festival was born, and now I’m talking about its first edition. A year of work has flyed away whithin two full weeks, maybe too full of those feelings that only art can give. It would be easy to make a long list and I would also wonder you with adjectives and phrases that surely would melt your heart into bitter tears if you were not went to via Galilei, maybe just for one night. The other testimonies, photos and prizes into this website are the proof of what is happened, maybe… is lack a bit of sweat and angryness and problems and satisfactions that cinema and theatral festivals bring with them. I’d like to say a lot of other things, but during the Festival’s night I’ve spoken to much, and so I just have to thank people that had share this experience with me, people whom I shooke the hand and people whom I did not… we tried to do the best, and the next year would be
better.
Sul film
Also if I’ve loved any film that partecipate to this festival, I’d like to write some words just about those ones that have caught my immagination (finally I can say my personal notes).
Vito's way
A short film elegant and fine, with a strong authorial personality. Played, or better lived, realistically. An idea that can become an interesting feature film.
Il colore del silenzio [The colour of silence]
The theme was not easy, but it was approached with absolute originality and a strong partecipation. The cinematography strikes for the reasearch, but the playing is not very convincing.
Quelli di via Artom [Those from Artom Road]
No doubt, that it was the best work in the contest, perfect music, stories, direction, cinematography. A documentary that leaves you bitter into the mouth and testifies our times without rethoric. It must be seen, especially mayors and local politicians of all Italian country would have to stay at home for a afternoon and watch this work, instead of staying in the town hall… it would help them to be less “power citizens” and more “real
citizens”.
17 e 30 [Half past five p.m.]
Also this work is an exemple of the hight quality of the works presented, thanks to a modern and accurate direction, the only negative point is that this story seems to me too much diveded into its two parts. I just can say that there are two short films in one. Absolutely elegant and good Patrizio Cigliano and Luciano Roffi’s playing.
Alex e le donne [Alex and the women]
Fun and nice, smart and curious: this simple story is really interesting. A screenplay rich that testimonies the culture of the author, Luca Elmi, that I had the chance to meet during festival evenings and that strikes me for his authentical and nice human opening.
Ignotus [Unknowed]
Costume design and set decoration that had nothing to envy to biggest productions. A short film ready to become a feature film… I am sure that I’ve seen the first bit of the Italian Braveheart. Max Bartoli merits the chance to do a big film and Ignotus is the proof of this. Productors came ahead!
Un colpo fatto ad arte [An art blow]
Excuse the game of words, but Riccardo Graziosi’s work it’s surely an art blow!
Carrozza n°6 [Coach n° 6]
This work had coaught my imagination, the guys are good and the story is very intresting, as like the musics. There’s just a little lack of cinematography and it is a pity because it steals value to a sincere short film, that has a lot of human sensibility.
Anima mia lontana [My far soul]
Francesco Randazzo is really good! Within three minutes he caught and wraps the spectator in a strong, sensational vertigo: any word that I could say would be too much trivial. Good, good, good!
Arena [The colour of silence]
Meeting the author, Gino Pitaro, I understanded how much love, work, reasearch and passion there would be into a documentary. Gino Pitaro is gentle and partecipates actively in all things that he does, you can understand it just in the moment in which you start to talk with him, and he is capable to bring this personal merits into his works. He tempts me to start boxing one day! Good work for next future and continue to put grit and passion into things that you do!
About the Festival
(…) It is really very important, by my point of view, that the Festival is setted in the Esquilino area, a very multiethnic and multicultural Rome’s neighborhood, the area in which we use to meet each others. The Esquilino area is the real ideas and future yard in Rome for those who work in cinema and other cultural fields.
My Dear Friends,
I am very happy for the Festival and for the prize that Free Film Festival’s Jury gave me! I’d like to add just some things:
The name “Lanterna di Diogene” it’s very suitable for a film festival, I’m wondering that nobody had considered it, before. And this is not only for the epistemological, cultural and research reasons that join Diogenes and Epicurus with the seventh art, but also because the idea of a magical lamp is specific of the cinema’s pre-history; the idea of men’s shadows projected in a cave it’s very similar to the lamp’s idea and to the ancestral mechanic of the vision. It’s something very intuitive.
The prizes have the strangest names, it’s ununderstandable why nobody, before, had thought something different from “grolle”, “fryng pan”, etc. that are ununderstandable to the most of people…
The lamp’s idea is also joined with the sea and the night’s fishermen, and sea is my place. I was born in the country of Pythagoras, Menander, Cassiodorus, Tommaso Campanella and Gioacchino Fiore, you can see that there are a lot of similitudes, and some others are just arising into my mind…
(…)
I want to say that you are very warm and nice. The director, Kadour, is always very accurate, convivial and authoritative, he uses always the right words; my compliments for Jesce Sole.
Daniele Riba is a perfect showman. He has the sense of humor and he’s able to use the right times, I can imagine him showing the Free Film Festival (in a next future!) in Piazza Vittorio, in the open air or in a temporary building.
It was beautiful if there were prizes with a lamp form, or also with the form of an old man between seawaves and wind, that carries a lamp.
By my point of view, after the experience of shooting a documentary about important themes using new equipments with my friends, receiving a prize that’s called “Lanterna di Diogene for Research” it’s a good sign esxpecially here, in via Galileo Galilei, next to the Porta Alchemica, that was used, as it’s said, to discover another dimention and other worlds… And it’s also a prize that gives to me and my friends a lot of happiness and that incentives me to work better and better.
We will remain in contact, and in september we can link our websites!
The last thing that I’d like to add, is that I saw very interesting works. Seeing various films, by my point of view, was an occasion for comparison, not in the sense of the contest, but in a knowing sense. Understanding what other groups of partecipants did and how they make cinema and audiovisual works (with much many equipments or not) but similar to us for the free, new and pioneering approach, as it was for early XX Century’s cinema in towns like Turin and Naples.
www.young-lions.it
Sul Festival
I’d like to make my compliments to the Artistic Director and to his collaborators for the atmosphere that you create in the awarding day (I was there): serene, the one of a friend’s group that meet each others to savor a passion, a moment of artistic pleasure.
Sui film
Kadour Naimi’s movie, Jesce Sole is realistic, raw, essential, without decorations.
It has chiaroscuros that are darkly artistic, the music selection is very accurate, the plot is interesting, very good the tracking scene on the stairs, that I consider, for thrilling that it stimulates, one of the mos dramatic of cinema’s history.
The work shows how integration could be difficoult in this country, and, despite of this, the importance of living it deeply, with braveness.