Music and the performing arts
No stranger to long, cold winters, this is a country of spinning the yarn during the night watches tending the animals: one old man might tell a story, another might act it out. These are invitations to song and to story-telling. They are deliberate choices of our imagination. The wonder of performance, which in turn creates wonderment, has one of its homelands here.” Tribute to Federico Fellini. His words capture the spirit of cinema in Emilia-Romagna: the miraculous and the popular, the taste for performance as the taste for life. Directors born in our region and famous worldwide pointed the camera at the place they came from: Michelangelo Antonioni´s Ferrara; Fellini´s Rimini; Bernardo Bertolucci´s Parma; Pupi Avati´s Bologna and Apennines; Cesare Zavattini´s Po valley "lowlands". Pier Paolo Pasolini was born and trained in Bologna with Valerio Zurlini; in Carpi Liliana Cavani expresses her dissent in films such as "Galileo"; in Sant´Arcangelo di Romagna Tonino Guerra writes the script of "Amarcord" with Fellini.
Then there’s Marco Bellocchio, a "foreigner" in his native Piacenza, Gian Vittorio Baldi, Florestano Vancini, Renzo Renzi, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Carlo di Carlo. Place names and landscapes are woven into the story of this region, a story made up of images and memories which bear witness to the unique position of Emilia-Romagna on the Italian cinema scene.
The silver screen in Emilia Romagna.
Of all the Italian regions, Emilia-Romagna is second in terms of cinema attendances and number of cinemas, which include a network of over 60 art house cinemas. Bologna is host to one of the largest film archives in Italy, the city council archives, which include the historic Lumière cinema and the “L’immagine ritrovata” (The image restored) laboratory for restoring film. The film archive of the Cineteca di Bologna houses a collection of fifteen thousand films, from silent movies to talkies and documentaries.
Of particular interest are the Soviet film collection, the recently acquired Chaplin archive , the silent movie collection, one of the largest in Italy with more than 200 titles, the collection of Italian news-reels and documentaries from 1920 to the present day plus the collection of Italian popular cinema from the Thirties to the Sixties. Rimini, meanwhile, pays tribute to the great Master of the “Dolce vita” through the city council’s film archive and the Federico Fellini Foundation. Another important institution based in Emilia-Romagna is the San Biagio Centre in Cesena. In addition to two movie theatres, a library specialized in cinema and a well stocked video library, the centre houses one of Italy’s most important photo archives, the Museo dell’Immagine, which preserves important collections of photograph of movie set and individuals linked to the world of cinema. Among the many film festivals of international standing are “Cinema Ritrovato” (Cinema Restored), a fully-fledged festival of film and cinema archives from al lover the world and “Le Parole dello Schermo” (Words of the Big Screen), a festival dedicated to the fertile relationship between cinema and literature.
Bologna also plays host to the annual “Future Film Festival”, the country’s most important festival dedicated entirely to animated films, the latest digital technologies and special effects. Rimini also hosts an event dedicated to animation cinema with the exciting “Cartoon Club” festival. Finally, another cinema genre in which audiences are showing increasing interest, the documentary, is the focus of the “Bellaria Film Festival”, the “Ilaria Alpi Award” in Riccione and the “Biografilm Festival”, the first event of its kind dedicated entirely to biographies and life stories.
