Italian Film Festival: show a different Italy

Italian Film Festival was held, aiming at promoting the Italian culture and cinema, as well as showing a different Italy.

Film lovers gathered at the Chapter Arts Centre to enjoy the last day of Italian Film Festival this week.
With almost 20 films running over the event, the organisers were hoping to challenge perceptions of Italy.
Organiser Luca Paci, a lecturer at Swansea University, said, “We want to promote Italian culture, cinema and show Italy. Generally, you think of Italy as pizza, football, we want to show a different Italy, Italy can do other things.”
The event also featured talks from writers as well as musical performances. “We also wanted to have a place where Italians and Welsh Italians and welsh people could come and meet so that the cultures would intermingle together.”

Dr. Haili, one of the audience, said, “I think this kind of place, because the premier is to perceived as an artist space, so anything to do with artist, with critical thinking will attract in a slightly different group of thinkers, because the price difference also attracts an older generation, because only this company can afford the tickets, and only the top of cinema like here, so it’s not a mainstream commercial entertainment.”
“This is a festival of mostly independent Italian cinema, so it’s not necessarily the most mainstream films, those directors, they are really the people who were keeping the independent Italian cinema industry alive,” said Loredana Polezzi, professor of school of translation at Cardiff University.

Dr. Haili Ma shared her feedback of Maria per Roma, “this seems to be new realism, dealing with the migrants and or immigration, the immigrants life and quite contemporary rather than historical kind of films, so that’s my impression. The story tells about today’s Italian community, how people live now with the multinational impact, especially because of the feature of the dogs, it brings a sense of warm and humor into this film. I love it.”