A summer night in southern Italy and a crowd sits in the piazza of a small town as looming images flicker across a film screen a few steps away from a faded baroque church.
It could be a scene from Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 elegy to the provincial cinemas of his youth, steadily disappearing in the face of the all-conquering advance of television.
Instead, it is part of a festival aimed at trying to bring back cinema to places such as Casacalenda, a town of about 2,500 inhabitants in Molise, a southern region on the eastern side of Italy where movie theaters are now a rarity.
“Up until 30 or 40 years ago, every little Italian town had its own cinema, which gradually died out with the advent of television and that kind of cultural change,” -MoliseCinema festival director Federico Pommier said. “The idea of the festival is to try to bring back the experience of cinema to these kinds of small towns.”
“In the whole of Molise, there are only two or three cinemas and it’s very difficult for people living in these places, not just in Casacalenda, but in all the other towns nearby to get to see films on a big screen,” Pommier said.
Recent waves of government austerity measures have eaten into the budgets of festivals like -MoliseCinema, but there is little doubting its popularity in Casacalenda, where almost everyone in town seems to have come out to the films.
Italian cinema has undergone something of a revival in recent years with directors like Paolo Sorrentino, Nanni Moretti or Matteo Garrone making films that have managed to emerge from the shadows of past maestros such as Federico Fellini or Luchino Visconti.
The week-long Molise festival opened this year with a screening of the magnificent restoration of Il gattopardo (“The Leopard”), Visconti’s 1963 masterpiece set in Sicily during the 19th century unification of Italy 150 years ago.
However, it contained an eclectic mix from 20 cigarettes, a harrowing feature about Italian troops in Iraq, and Tatanka, a story of boxing and the Naples Mafia to debut productions by young Italian directors or Australian and Japanese short films.
MoliseCinema, now in its ninth edition, is a long way from the glittering lights and red carpets of global extravaganzas like Cannes or the Venice film festival, Italy’s premier film showcase which opens at the end of the month.
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