FREE SCREENING
Post-screening Q&A with visiting and local filmmakers and jurors!
The IFF celebrates 10 years of Italian cinema in the Twin Cities with the new Building Bridges: Emerging Filmmaker Awards. We created these awards to make connections between Italy and Minnesota though film and to recognize short works by new filmmakers in each place. This year’s theme, “Places of Memory and Change,” asked filmmakers to submit works that focused on some aspect of history, memory, or geography. By drawing connections between the diverse communities and landscapes that make up the state of Minnesota with the people and places that define Italy’s cities and towns, our goal is to build visual bridges between our current home and the one many of us left behind. As disputes over immigrants’ rights and place divide the US, we hope to highlight the links between people and place and to demonstrate the ways that film can bring us together by displaying our similarities, our differences, and our growing need for understanding. Our talented jurors—Koel Banerjee, Tommaso Cammarano, Eric D. Howell, and Bruna Roccasalva—selected three films from this year’s competition.
Winner: Jury Prize, Best Short Italy
WE WANTED TO MAKE PICTURES
Niccolò Gentili
14 mins
Paolo from Calabria and Davor from Serbia have one aim in life: to make pictures. Unskilled filmmakers, they are united by their love for Italian great Marco Bellocchio, so when they learn that he will shoot his next film in Bobbio, they know they must meet him and discover the secret to making pictures.
Winner: Jury Prize, Best Short Minnesota
NEW NEIGHBORS
E.G. Bailey
9 mins
How far will a Mother go to protect her children? New Neighbors tells the story of a mother who moves her two sons to a new neighborhood to escape violence against black lives. A 2017 Sundance Official Selection, this film provides a clever and necessary approach to the Black Lives Matter dialogue.
Honorable Mention: Special Jury Prize, Italy
THE HOUSES WE WERE. LIVING IN ROME FROM 1948-2014.
Arianna Lodeserto
15 mins
Of what is a city made? In its careful design, who gets left out? This film looks at the first fifty years of the Low-Income Housing Institute in Rome, which created a “city within a city” to deal with “the main and persistent problem” in the Italy’s capital: housing. In this unique look at what seems like an unending issue, it is the the archives that respond.
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PRODUTTORE DI ELITE
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Italian Film Festival
The Italian Film Festival returns for its 10th year, bringing the best movies from Italy to the Twin Cities, presenting ten films total.
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